Axiological range of the publicist discourse: the value of «family» (based on the material of German periodical press)

The article is devoted to the study of the axiological features of modern German printed mass media which represent a special type of discursive practice. The multidimensional nature of the publicist discourse derives from the intrinsically explicit nature of its social and temporal determinability in media space. The methodology verbal realization for identifying the axiological features of the phenomenon of family in modern applied linguistic research is variable: consideration of the pragmalinguistic peculiarities of speech products and their lexical and semantic content, etc. are conditioned by the approach and direction the author selects. The present research builds on the methodological procedure for describing the field structure of value and its illustrative modelling. The appeal to the verbal explication of the value “family” allowed not only to obtain new data and clarify the features of its lexical and semantic model, but also to reveal deep transformations in the understanding of one of the most important social categories that cement the system of social relations. The analysis of the corpus of identified contexts (1352 names) has deter-mined that the structure of the value family / Familie features a number of peculiarities. Thus, the core of the field includes the primary onym as well as secondary categories (Verwandtschaft / relatives, Parentel / relatives, heirs, Sippschaft / relatives, etc.). The near periphery of the field consists of three components (lexical-semantic microfields): family as 1) an element of the organization of social relations (nicht legalisierte Gemeinschaft / illegitimate cohabitation; die Gattenfamilie / family based on marriage), 2) an association of immediate family and relatives (Sprössling / offspring, child; Ehepaar / married couple), 3) an entity of economic activity (der Haushaltsführer / owner). The far periphery of the field structure of the value contains emotional-evaluative components. The most frequent among them are various metaphors (most commonly with a positive semantic meaning: Liebesnest / love nest; der letzte Schutzraum / last refuge; Hafen in einer herzlosen Welt / pier in a heartless world, etc., and less often – with a negative connotation: Nervenspagat / twine for nerves; Orga-Katastrophe / organizational disaster, etc.). The feature of particular interest revealed by the analysis is a rather broad semantic range of lexemes representing various types of building familial relationships that are different from the traditional concept of the family: Probeehe / trial marriage; nicht legalisierte Gemeinschaft / illegitimate cohabitation; Commuter-Ehe / regular-separate marriage, etc., which testifies to conceptual transformations in the axiological picture of the world of the German linguistic culture.

Conclusion

The Conclusion takes up the conspicuous absence of life after marriage in the prior chapters by examining Edith Wharton’s late novel The Gods Arrive (1932), other interwar writing about marriage and maternity, and more recent media that likewise deals with these stumbling blocks for modern ideals of female independence. The Gods Arrive is both a catalog of modern love—divorce, trial marriage, companionate marriage, free love, single motherhood—and a saga of failed female authorship that enumerates how new liberties differently disempower women and preserve expectations of their affective labor, while further excluding them from alternative forms of production. The chapter concludes by exploring the endurance of modern sentimentalism in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century writing by female authors, and argues that ironic sentimentalism continues to afford women artists a formal and structural logic for expressing the double binds of modern femininity.

Marriage stability in a pastoralist society

We examined how individual investment was associated with the duration of marriage partnerships in a pastoralist society of Amdo Tibetans in China. We collected demographic and socioeconomic data from 420 women and 369 men over five villages to assess which factors predicted partnership length. We found that the payment of dowry and bridewealth from both sides of the family predicted marriage stability. The production of offspring, regardless of their survivorship, also had a positive effect on marriage duration, as did trial marriage, a time period before formal marriage. Finally, we found that if both bride and groom invest resources initially into a partnership—whether wealth or labor—their subsequent partnership is stronger than couples who do not make such investments. This paper adds to our understanding of complex social institutions like marriage from a behavioral ecological perspective.