ALUE ATTITUDES OF PRESIDENTIAL POWER: DISTRIBUTIVE-SEMANTIC ANALYSIS

Abstract

Introduction. The value attitudes of state power and officials are crucially important both in the forma- tion of state policy and its legitimation. The purpose of the article is to analyze the value orientations of the presidential power in Russia in the form they are provided in public statements of the RF President.

Materials and methods. The research refers to the corpus of speeches of the President of the Russian Federation in the period from 2000 to 2020, published on the official presidential website. On this basis, a vector distributive-semantic model is formed, allowing for a comprehensive analysis of various aspects of the presidential public discourse, including its value structure. For this, a basic value thesaurus is devel- oped, covering four value groups: "folk", ideological, Christian and consumerist. Each thesaurus is expanded through the closest associates revealed by publicly available vector models of the Russian-language corpora. Subsequent clustering enables forming a value representations structure based on the collocations frequen- cy of associates of the first, second, and third orders. The application of the same procedures to a publicly available vector model based on the National Corpus of the Russian Language makes it possible to compare the specifics of the presidential discourse with the general Russian value-semantic area.

Results. Through the analysis 13 value-semantic clusters, structuring the presidential discourse, were identified, which form a conservative militarized and religiously oriented core, focused mainly on the anti- values of misfortunes and threats, and isolated clusters associated with progressive and modernization values, as well as values of cooperation - largely referring to foreign partners.

Discussion. The comparison of the valuesemantic structure of the presidential discourse with the model data, based on the National Corpus of the Russian Language, made it possible to draw conclusions about the significant similar, and even common features, of a part of the value-semantic clusters (traditionalism, Christian religious commitment, focus on misfortunes and threats), as well as noticeable differences, primarily in relation to emotional content of values, content depth and value dichotomies of cleverness / stupidity and truth / lies