Allegorization and personification of model images within union work argumentative discourse

The study is aimed at identifying the peculiarities of allegorization and personification of the model personality “teacher/mentor” abstract features in the union work argumentative discourse. Analytical and informational messages of the All-Russian Union of Education served as the material for the analysis. They were selected as specific texts based on the transmission of a model image in order to create a dichotomous space of unity that takes into account both professional and moral characteristics of a model personality. The methodological approach was the discursive and modus method with elements of event analysis, semantic and conceptual analysis, which made it possible to identify the illocutionary goals of implementing precedent names on an allegorical basis and cases of expanding the generalized content of images in the process of personification. Based on the analysis, the key characteristics of precedent names that most effectively represent a model professional personality of the linguacultural type “teacher/mentor” were identified. They included socio-cultural focus, brightness, meliorativeness, reality, historicity, fixedness, narrow specificity. The maximum effect is achieved by combining in the allegorical personification retrotopic components associated with the implementation of historical and real characteristics, and protopic ones, which are based on permanence, socio-cultural marking and meliorativeness. The implementation of protopic elements is carried out on the basis of associative situational reminiscences to precedent texts and statements with the “novum” component as a key characteristic of narrowly specific pedagogical activity. In the union discourse, due to the focus on both a competent and a broad recipient, only the superficial interpretative layer of the precedent text is actualized. The most popular precedent names of the Russian union work discourse in a narrowly specialized connection to the pedagogical activity are personalities of Russian and soviet pedagogues, personifying the model personality of “teacher/mentor” and serving as an allegory to pedagogical activity.