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Representation of the concept 'thief' in the modern mass media

The main purpose of the article was to study the representation of the concept 'thief' in the language of Russian mass media. This concept is important for both national and scientific legal concept spheres. The appeal to journalistic texts is due to the fact that they quickly reflect the main characteristics of the current state of mass consciousness and manifest its key stereotypes. The analysis was carried out in accordance with the main task of the study: to identify the key features of the concept represented in the media. In the course of the study, information from the newspaper subcorpus of the National corpus of the Russian language was used in order to collect and analyze empirical data. Semantic analysis of the contexts containing the key word of the concept revealed basic characteristics of the concept prevailing in the mass national consciousness. The authors conclude that the romantic and heroic image of the thief, which has deep folklore and literary roots, continues to exist as one of the prevalent characteristics of this concept in modern public consciousness. This image of the thief is largely formed by modern mass cinema, literature and music which are discussed in the media. The image of the so called «thief in law», often mentioned in the analyzed material, also partly contributes to the strengthening of the romantic features of this concept, since it implies following some alternative principles of morality and honor. At the same time, the research has shown that this concept receives an ambiguous evaluation in the Russian society, since the idea of criminality of this phenomenon is clearly expressed in many of the contexts under study.