The GI ethos as a part of the US cultural code (as exemplified by precedent texts of the military sublanguage)

Abstract

The paper scrutinizes professional image of the American serviceman’s world from the axiological perspective. It focuses on US national values as well as the moral and ethical image of the military cohort. The object of the study is the axiosphere of the US military society expressed in the official register of the military sublanguage. The subject area of our research embraces precedent texts of military officialese, which set forth the basis of military ethos. This research aims to identify unique value orientations attributed to the US military cohort’s members. On the one hand, these values constitute the professional ethos and, on the other hand, however, they collide with generally accepted axiological standards of the civilian mother culture. The scientific novelty of the study consists in the fact that the comparison of maternal culture values and the values of its socio-professional group of service members is conducted for the first time. Despite the abundance of publications on this issue (mainly works in sociology, psychology, medicine, and history), the phenomenon of the identity of a serviceman’s professional ethos is still insufficiently examined from the standpoint of linguocultural studies and sociolinguistics. The research findings demonstrated a partial identity of the value orientations compared. The professional environment reveals a number of values that are largely not inherent in the “civilian world”. The latter include messianism, a sense of belonging to the highest values of the nation, sacrifice of military service, collective spirit (esprit de corps), and others. This paper represents the first attempt to dissect the axiosphere of the GI through textual works of officialese. The contrastive analysis allowed us to identify the key values declared by the US defense establishment.