Autostereotypes of bearers of Russian ethnolinguoculture as a way of self-identification

   The article considers the phenomenon of a mental stereotype as a cognitive category which determines the specifics of the people’s value orientations, their worldview and self-identity. Via contextual analysis, we attempted to identify Russian ethno-linguistic culture bearers’ autostereotypes, which are formed as a result of the nation’s cognitive experience formed in the process of perception and conceptualization of its socio-historical and cultural past and present reality. The study is based on Russian jokes about the Russians. We used a continuous sampling method to find the material in the open-access Internet sources and selected 240 texts with key autostereotypes. Subsequent systematization made it possible to subsume the empirical material into four groups: images of the personages from Russian folklore (29.6 %), political figures (22.1 %), typical representatives of the Russian ethnos (20 %) and stereotypical features inherent in the Russian people (28.3 %). The contextual analysis of the linguistic means, representing stereotypical images of the Russian ethnos representatives (their mentality and speech-behavioral models), is based on the thesaurus of the “Russian Associative Dictionary” and other sources. This approach allowed us to identify the associative background of the ethnonym and its associative stereotypical nominations transmitted by Russian jokes in the linguistic consciousness of modern bearers of Russian linguoculture. Statistical data and the associative background allowed us to determine the “unique code” of the Russian person, comprising both positive and negative traits. In general, the process of stereotype formation is based on the assimilation of the informational component of social representations determined by extralinguistic factors, with its subsequent verbalization as a result of the established structure of value orientations in the text of the Russian joke through a variety of linguistic units, means and methods. In this sense, ethnic autostereotypes are a kind of view “from the inside”, with the resulting self-assessment and identification of their ethno-linguistic and cultural code, whereas the Russian joke is a translator of characteristic themes, ideas and images, the ethnosociocultural nature and essence of the people.

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