‘Sexagenarians’ in the Modern Media Context of Russia and Greece

The authors focus on the peculiarities of the linguistic objectification of the concept of "sixties’ in the materials of the Russian and Greek media. In the light of global changes in the gradation of age groups due to a wide range of economic, ideological and demographic realities, media resources today choose different (in comparison with the beginning of the XXI century) axiological vectors of publications about the social stratum 60+ and thereby form a new "optics" of perception of people of mature age. The analysis of media texts actualizing the concept of "sixty-year-olds" convinces of the expansion of its semantic scope in recent decades and demonstrates extraordinary, in many ways opposite to stereotypical representations, trends in the description of older people, as a result of which the cluster of Russian and Greek lexical units attributing this age group is continuously replenished with new components. The displacement and redistribution of thematic dominants explicating the categorical characteristics of the concept of the "sixty year old" in the media space demonstrates the new position of the media in the ideology and culture of the two countries, actively supported by native speakers of both Russian and Greek. The presence of a number of universal verbal signs reflecting values common to Russian/Greek linguistic cultures testifies to the cognitive process of rethinking humanity's ideas about old age, which is uniform for the world space, while the methods of constructing a media image and its general palette in two different ethnic communities have their own specifics, which gives the lexeme the sixty-year status of the "name" of an information and ideological product and He characterizes the concept of "sixty years old" as an extremely significant and relevant fragment of the national-linguistic picture of the world.