Cultural Code in Scientific and Journalistic Dimensions

This article explores the distinctive features of the term “cultural code” within scientific and journalistic discourses. The materials for analysis are drawn from newspaper articles and partially from the main corpus of the Russian National Corpus, as well as from scholarly works in linguistics, cultural studies, and philosophy. It has been identified that the expression “cultural code” activates specific components of the phrase: the sign-based nature of the code engages lexicon from the technical sphere (such as program, copy, decode, etc.); the value aspect of culture (the cultural component) highlights actions denoted by verbs like preserve, protect, transmit, among others, as well as abstract concepts such as values, knowledge, understanding, and mastery. The study demonstrates that the models used to recreate the image of the cultural code in journalistic texts differ from those in scientific discourse, exhibiting a vivid evaluative quality with both positive and negative semantics. It is noted that the word formation productivity of the term “code” in scientific discourse is linked to scholars’ efforts to reveal an objective structure and emphasize its relation to the original, generative word (with prefixes and prefixoids such as mega-, sub-, meta-, psycho-).