THE SPECIFICS OF THE IMAGE COMPONENT OF THE NEW CULTURAL-HUMANITARIAN HOLIDAYS IN RUSSIA

Abstract

The author aims to determine the denotation-reference map of new cultural and humanitarian holidays reflected in modern calendars. As a result of the survey of native speakers (234 people aged 17 to 70 years), only 20 holidays out of 50 passed the five percent threshold for knowledge of the existence of a holiday. Some of them are not related to religious or mythological systems, others refer to religious and mythological systems. The second part of the study was conducted in order to identify those holidays that have repetitive patterns of behavior. It was revealed that only 12 new calendar dates have such properties (International Day of Friendship; Intenational Yoga Day; World Kissing Day / International Kiss Day; International Cat Day, International Coffee Day; International Dance Holiday; International Hug Day; Earth Hour; Halloween; Day of the Dead; St Patrick’s Day; Valentine’s Day). The third stage was the identification of typical actions and holiday-related objects using a distributive analysis of the contexts describing them in the media. The results of the study indicate the predominance of the aesthetic function of a modern holiday over a world-modeling one and prove the hypothesis that when a holiday is transferred to another culture, it moves from a religious or mythological picture of the world to a naive one and loses its ritualism and sacred meaning. The results of the data analysis show that the cultural — humanitarian holiday, as a variant of the secular holiday concept, is distinguished by the predominance of the individual aspect over the social, the absence of a ritual component and connection with the narrative at the base of the event; the absence of a system of statuses, the presence of a system of roles; the absence of the process of creating a different space; these holidays are not a means of ethno-cultural identification. The obtained lists of dominant lexemes of cultural-humanitarian holidays are useful in selecting cultural material for creating textbooks on the Russian language for foreign students. The material of the analysis was the articles of the newspaper subcorpus of the Russian National Corpus. Refs 19.