Representation of the concept “past” by the elderly: Based on the comments of the social network “VKontakte”

   The emergence and development of the Internet and information technologies in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries marked the formation of many interesting discoveries. The World Wide Web today is not only a means of communication, but also an unconventional communicative form that has given rise to virtual discourse and new scientific trends. Within the framework of Internet linguistics, diverse comprehensive studies are being actively conducted. Research into the electronic communicative space concepts is popular. This work reveals the “essence” of one of the leading concepts of senior people’s network discourse. The article describes the results of a content analysis of the Internet discourse, used by the elderly on the social network “VKontakte”, presents a content analysis of the community “We Are Pensioners”, analyzes the comments of publications left by the subscribers of this community. We provide a semantic-cognitive analysis of the selected concept and give its graphical model. Thus, content research, which involves the analysis of the publication texts, made it possible to establish that the key and most commented concept is the concept of “past”. The comments enabled us to conduct a semantic-cognitive analysis of the concept identifying its lexical representants (the core, the near, far and extreme peripheries) with a positive and negative character, structured into similar groups (the quality of life, human qualities, the quality of products and goods, characteristic features of sociocultural spheres).

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