Linguistic Representation of Professional Values in Popular Science Discourse of IT: Axiological and Pragmatic Perspective

Abstract

The article examines how professional values acquire linguistic form and spread via the modern discourse of Information Technology. As an extremely dynamic sphere of human activity, the industry of information technology reflects the processes that take place in the society and influence the way people interact, share information, process data and implement knowledge. As a result, the language that is employed for describing, informing, reporting and promoting IT products and ideas inevitably reflects the most important concepts that are typical of this sphere, i.e., values. The article explores the way the discourse of IT is shaped and linguistically conditioned by a certain professional value system and its features. This is the area that has not been thoroughly explored from the standpoint of linguistics, but which, however, requires substantial research due to apparent societal and scientific relevance. The study of popular science discourse as presented in the biggest technology magazines revealed that values determine the language means, modality of the texts, communication aims, all of which are set by the addresser. Moreover, when viewed from the perspective of linguistics, values are found to depend on the language both for the cognitive and pragmatic purposes. Identification and interpretation of the most prominent values of the popular science discourse of IT is aimed to bridge socio-cognitive, linguistic and pragmatic aspects of these entities: an interdisciplinary study that has not been conducted before.

How to Shape Professional Identity Through Next-Generation Textbooks: From Multilingualism to Global Citizenship

“…In this respect, it is worth mentioning the conceptual linguistic engineering of professional identity and one of the necessary methods to single out, adapt and tailor the marital to the students' particular needs (Bagiyan & Shiryaeva, 2018). We believe this method would be ideal for segmenting the necessary axiologically-and pragmatically-charged language material which would help to adequately shape students' professional identity.…”

“…We believe this method would be ideal for segmenting the necessary axiologically-and pragmatically-charged language material which would help to adequately shape students' professional identity. The main objective of the method is to make a corpus of authentic materials and subject them to discourse-analysis, linguistic-conceptual analysis, pragmaaxiological and socio-lexicographic analysis, after which categorize the materials into fragments ready to be used for materials production (see Shiryaeva et al, 2018). The discourse features need to be meaningful, salient, and frequently encountered; at the same time, the process of materials categorization should suit the contexts in which they are supposed to be used.…”