Semantic features of moral discourse (based on the German Corpus DWDS)

The article aims to determine semantic features of moral discourse. Scientific novelty of the work lies in the authors’ approach to analyzing the semantic features of moral discourse considering the most typical collocations of the key concept of Moral. As a result of the study, typical collocations of the noun Moral in the sources of the 20th and 21st centuries were extracted, their quantitative and qualitative features were determined. An analysis of examples of moral discourse with typical collocations of the word Moral revealed the presence of the topics “morality”, “religion”, “law”, “crime” in it. At the end of the 20th century the topical structure of moral discourse is expanded by the topics "politics" and “power”. The semantics of moral discourse is revealed through the choice of lexical units, sociocultural context and intertextuality. Intertextuality is manifested in the use of precedent phenomena that refer to moral issues. Moral discourse is characterized by semantic contrasts and negative appraisal, which indicate the predominance of material values over moral ones, the loss of the moral basis of life. The results of the study contribute to the development of discourse analysis, corpus and axiological linguistics, German lexicology and linguoculturology.