The Concept of Den'gi (Money) in the St. Petersburg Population at the Beginning of the 1990s

Zusammenfassung

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Social change brings about discursive change. Particularly, it causes shifts of meaning within the key concepts of social discourse. The concept of den'gi (money) has undergone fundamental alteration in Russian language and culture since perestroika. This conceptual change will be discussed in the following article. My findings are based on a corpus of interviews recorded in St. Petersburg in 1993. The concepts compared, i.e. the concept of den'gi before and after perestroika, respectively, can only be sketched out roughly here. The interviews conducted in 1993 reveal conflicting discourses on money that are rooted in Russian, Soviet-Russian - the traces of the minor role money played in the Soviet era were still present in social discourse in 1993 - and free enterprise ideologies, respectively. They also reveal that by that time a clear tendency towards a concept of money oriented by market economy had already emerged, at least among the younger urban population.

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Auszug

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The Concept of Den'gi (Money) in the St. Petersburg Population at the Beginning of the 1990s

1. Introduction

The word den gi (money) entered the Russian language "from the East" (most likely of Turkish origin), not before the latter half of the thirteenth century (Stepanov 2001:562-3). The denotative meaning of the word den gi has been stable for a long time, a fact illustrated by the explanations given in any dictionary, for example, the entry in the encyclopaedia published during the Soviet era, and in the economics dictionary published in the second half of the nineties: "a specific good that fulfils the role of a general medium of exchange that expresses the value of all goods" (Enciklopediceskij slovar' 1963:321), "a special type of universal good, used as a general medium of exchange to express the value of all other goods" (Rajzberg et al. 1996:76).1

A term so central to society as dengi, however, does not consist in its denotative meaning alone, i.e. the relationship between word and nonverbal entity; it rather represents a "concept" - a "founding cell of the culture in the mental world of a person" (Stepanov 2001:43). In the theory of cognitive linguistics, concepts are mental depictions of reality that structure our perception and our knowledge of the world in all its inherent facets.2 Concepts, therefore, combine individual and social perceptions. The majority of concepts, albeit not all of them, correspond to words present in natural language. The lexical meaning, which more or less corresponds to its dictionary entry, primarily determines the reality that the given word describes, roughly constituting people's linguistic consciousness of the word's possibilities in use. Encyclopaedic information, positive and negative connotations and world knowledge constitute additional components of the concept over and abov...

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