Linguistic Representation of Professional Values in Popular Science Discourse of IT: Axiological and Pragmatic Perspective

The article examines how professional values acquire linguistic form and spread via the modern discourse of Information Technology. As an extremely dynamic sphere of human activity, the industry of information technology reflects the processes that take place in the society and influence the way people interact, share information, process data and implement knowledge. As a result, the language that is employed for describing, informing, reporting and promoting IT products and ideas inevitably reflects the most important concepts that are typical of this sphere, i.e., values. The article explores the way the discourse of IT is shaped and linguistically conditioned by a certain professional value system and its features. This is the area that has not been thoroughly explored from the standpoint of linguistics, but which, however, requires substantial research due to apparent societal and scientific relevance. The study of popular science discourse as presented in the biggest technology magazines revealed that values determine the language means, modality of the texts, communication aims, all of which are set by the addresser. Moreover, when viewed from the perspective of linguistics, values are found to depend on the language both for the cognitive and pragmatic purposes. Identification and interpretation of the most prominent values of the popular science discourse of IT is aimed to bridge socio-cognitive, linguistic and pragmatic aspects of these entities: an interdisciplinary study that has not been conducted before.