The Semantics of the Collective in Online Communities in the Pandemic Context
The article presents some results of a scientific project devoted to studying semantics of unity and animosity in Russian lexis and phraseology and explores the semantics of the collective in the communication of online communities. The authors aim at revealing the key semantic components of the collective constructed by the members of online communities. The research material includes posts published in three Russian-language and English-language online communities in the social networks VKontakte and Facebook. In their methodology, the authors draw on social constructionism, critical discourse analysis, and G. Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory. The results have shown that the same mechanisms are used to construct the collective in Russian-language and English-language online communities. The semantics of the collective is formed by three interconnected components: spatial, temporal, and axiological. The participants are united by spatial proximity which is constructed by references to familiar geographic locations and common sociocultural events. The authors reveal the wish of the participants to continue interaction in physical settings. The authors demonstrate the importance of collective memory and prediction, constructed by means of allusions to the events of the collective past and future. The paper suggests that the collective values shared by community members include openness, kindness, mutual assistance, solidarity, etc. It is shown that the social interdependence of the participants is constructed by means of lexical units, phrasal verbs, idioms, slogans with the semantics of unity, anthropomorphic and nature-morphic metaphors, precedent texts, as well as multimodal components semiotically representing the unification of people.