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List of publications on a keyword: «афроамериканский вариант английского языка»

  • Discursive Evolution and Pragmatic Ambivalence of the Idiom ‘Ride or Die’ in American Linguoculture

    Research Article
    Ethnic Culture Volume 8 No 3
    Authors:
    Nadezhda O. Samarkina, Aida R. Nurutdinova
    Work direction:
    World languages and literature
    Abstract:
    The study examines the linguacultural transformation of the image of unconditional loyalty in American English through the evolution of the idiom ‘ride or die’ — from a marker of criminal solidarity in African American English and 1990s hip-hop to its current pragmatic duality, where positive evaluation of absolute loyalty coexists with critique of toxic codependency in digital media. The empirical base comprises over 500 contexts: song lyrics, dictionary definitions, social media posts, icles from Cosmopolitan and Refinery, Reddit discussions, and materials from “The Ride or Die Project” (2013–2015), introduced into scholarly circulation for the first time. The methodology, grounded in the discursive paradigm, employs semantic-stylistic, discursive, contextual analysis and linguacultural interpretation based on V. I. Karasik’s model. The findings reveal that the key internal mechanisms are semantic broadening and grammaticalisation, corroborated by data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), while external drivers include mediatisation and consumerisation. Institutional recognition is marked by the idiom’s inclusion in Merriam-Webster Dictionary, Urban Dictionary, Green’s Dictionary of Slang. In contemporary discourse, the idiom exhibits pragmatic duality: positive evaluations in youth and consumer contexts coexist with critical reinterpretations of absolute loyalty as a marker of toxic codependency in feminist and psychological media. Analysis of “The Ride or Die Project” shows that critique of the concept is not exclusively a 2020s phenomenon: reflexive practices documented in 2013–2015 included rhetorical questions, metaphors of resource depletion, and calls for self-devotion that anticipated the feminist narrative. The study identifies pragmalinguistic mechanisms of critical reinterpretation: pragmatic reaccentuation, semantic differentiation, discursive marking, and reframing. A three-stage model of discursive evolution of a subcultural concept is proposed.
    Keywords:
    semantic transformation, image of unconditional loyalty, African American English, hip-hop culture, mediatisation, pragmatic duality
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