VALUE ASPECTS OF THE MAIDAN AS A CIVIL SOCIETY INSTITUTION (CASE STUDY OF GERMAN MEDIA DISCOURSE)

Abstract

With socio-political developments in Ukraine of the last decade, Ukraine frequently appears in the heart of political debate in European and global dimensions. World media coverage of socio-political events in Ukraine plays an important role in understanding the current socio-political developments on the post-Soviet space, Ukraine’s strivings for European inclusion, as well as the social and political value of the Euromaidan phenomenon by the global community. Alongside, the “European integration image” of the Ukrainian civil society is shaped via the way foreign media represent Ukraine’s transformations shapes. This paper is devoted to the problems of current conceptual equivalence of the mental units known as concepts. The study focuses on representation of the nationally-biased concept of MAIDAN as one of those functioning in both pan-European and global socio-political discourses of the recent years. MAIDAN-concept is being approached from the semantic-cognitive perspective which regards its model as a multilayer formation, consisting of notional, perceptive-imaginative and evaluative layers. Due to the long history and evolution of the concept, it has absorbed many conceptual features pertaining to different cultures. However, within the Ukrainian linguoculture its content has undergone sufficient modification and gained unique features, absent in other cultures already introduced to the original concept. In this study, MAIDAN is regarded as topical ethno-specific element within the conceptual profile UKRAINE. Specifically, the study considers reconstructing the elements of the evaluative layer (evaluative core) of the concept as rendered by German Internet-media. In particular, it considers the relevance of transference of value characteristics of the ethno-specific concept onto a different linguocultural space, as well as analyses the level of sufficiency of such representations for forming individual and collective judgements on the part of German-speaking communities. The prospects of further investigation into the topic lie within the comparative layer-by-layer analysing the actualization of topical Ukraine’s political concepts in individual discourses of the leading European and transatlantic policy-makers.