The Anonymous Concept of Valeriy Zaluzhny in Ukrainian Public Media Discourse

Abstract

The article clarifies the specifics of onymic concepts and research prospects for their study, reviews important works in the field of cognitive onomastics. The purpese of this investigation is to investigate the conceptual content of the anthroponym Valeriy Zaluzhny in Ukrainian public media discourse. Based on empirical material, the source of which was news and information texts published in popular online publications, a holistic conceptual image of General V. Zaluzhny was reconstructed, through which the media transmit him to the collective consciousness of Ukrainians. The following methods were used to implement the study: discursive analysis, denotative-qualitative typology, descriptive, modeling, and induction. The semantic components of the content of the studied concept in Ukrainian media discourse were determined, and their verbal explicators were structured into four zones: core, near-core, distant-core, and peripheral. The conclusion is argued that in the Ukrainian public discourse there is a process of conceptualization of the onym Valeriy Zaluzhny and its inclusion in the mental lexicon of Ukrainians as a symbol of the “iron general” and, more broadly, of a new generation of Ukrainian officers, which is being formed on the fronts of the Russian-Ukrainian war. We can speak of the entry of the proper name Valeriy Zaluzhny into the system of symbols of the national liberation struggles of Ukrainians. The prospect of further research in verifying the obtained results of the analysis of the content of the concept Valeriy Zaluzhny in the media discourse with the data of the associative experiment is outlined.