Негативный сдвиг в оценке этнонима: гипотеза контекстной обусловленности и инструменты измерения

Шаги/Steps. 2025. Т. 11. № 1. С. 174–191.

Громенко Е. С., Krongauz M.

The article examines the hypothesis of contextual
conditionality linking the assessment of an ethnonym with the
context. The assumption that words with negative connotation
gravitate towards negative contexts is tested. This means, in
particular, that quantitative processing of contexts can become
the basis for identifying a negative tone and its quantitative
qualification, i.e. the greater the percentage of negative contexts,
the more intense is the negative connotation in the semantics of
the word. The purpose of the study is to describe the quantitative
distribution by type of context (positive, neutral and negative) of
four ethnonyms: Asiatic, European, Italian, Tajik, and to offer
a meaningful interpretation of this distribution. In response to
this goal, the study clarifies assessments of context. Thus, firstly,
among various understandings of the negativity of the context, one
is selected («narrow contextual tonality”), and secondly, objective
criteria for qualifying the context as negative are developed. The
research material consisted of about 900 texts of comments and
posts obtained by a continuous sampling method for lexical and
grammatical search for the lexemes European, Asiatic, Tajik,
Italian in the subcorpus of Social networks of the National Corpus
of the Russian Language. An additional method for assessing the
negativity of an ethnonym is considered: replacing a negative word
with a euphemism. For names of ethnic groups, such a neutral
replacement is the construction of a person of ... nationality.

Keywords: экспертная оценка, негативность, этнонимы, негативный сдвиг, контекстная обусловленность, нейтральный этноним, негативный контекст, тональность контекста, широкая контекстуальная тональность, эвфемия