Nominations of Socially Vulnerable Groups in Legal Space and outside It
This article examines a group of lexical units which belong to the category of “socially disadvantaged individuals”: people with disabilities, physically challenged, people with impaired mobility, the unemployed, orphans, and those in need, and studies the peculiarities of their use in everyday spee...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | Russian |
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Ural Federal University Press
2019-12-01
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| Series: | Известия Уральского федерального университета. Серия 2: Гуманитарные науки |
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| Online Access: | https://journals.urfu.ru/index.php/Izvestia2/article/view/4310 |
| Summary: | This article examines a group of lexical units which belong to the category of “socially disadvantaged individuals”: people with disabilities, physically challenged, people with impaired mobility, the unemployed, orphans, and those in need, and studies the peculiarities of their use in everyday speech and in legal discourse. The set phrase “person with disabilities” is analysed in detail as a hyperonym for more specific terms, i.e. a wheelchair person, an autist, deaf-blind and deaf-mute, etc. Interpretations given in traditional explanatory dictionaries emphasise physiological features over social ones, and the ideographic dictionaries of the Russian language tend to group the units studied according to the type of disease/disability. Semantically and pragmatically, the relevant factors include the foregrounding of individual elements of the meaning of the word in context and whether a unit can be used as a form of self-identification. The author studies the problem of lexical reference to these individuals as recipients of charitable assistance. The asymmetry and lacunarity of the lexical system become apparent since it contains plenty of units denoting the subjects of charity, whereas, for the addressee of charitable assistance, called the beneficiary in the language of law, an official name is lacking. The current system of names of socially disadvantaged groups and recipients of charitable assistance testifies to the development of social institutions of philanthropy. At the same time, the formation of the philanthropic thesaurus in the Russian language is complicated, as many lexical units are semantically opaque and loaded with ideological and emotional-evaluative connotations. |
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| ISSN: | 2227-2283 2587-6929 |