Evaluative Priorities in the Linguistic Consciousness of Modern Russian Students

The article deals with the value preferences of modern Russian students on the material of surveys in several Russian universities. 250 people were interviewed. The informants were asked the following questions: Which behavioral flaw do your friends consider to be the most forgivable and the most unforgivable? What do they see as the main virtue in behavior of their peers? What in the behavior of the older generation in your friends’ view seems strange and unpleasant? It is found that students' evaluative priorities generally correspond to the communicative values of Russian linguoculture (openness, sincerity, benevolence) and the priorities of youth worldview (emotionality, spontaneity, independence). At the same time, we can see the peculiarities of modern attitudes to communication in the respondents' answers: acute rejection of communicative pressure and orientation to the expressed approval of one's attitude to the world by other people. To a certain extent, these features are conditioned by the norms and usus of network communication, which is the leading type of personal interactions of modern youth and in which the expression of mutual sympathy in the form of signs of approval dominates. The value picture of the world promoted by network discourse is a reduced worldview of people living in a constructed comfortable reality. Regrettably, many informants regard the usage of obscene words in friendly talk as acceptable mode of communication. The emphasis on tactfulness in communication as a necessary condition of communication can be explained by the norms of behavior in higher education, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, by the gender specificity of informants (girls are known to predominate among the surveyed students of philology).