Elena L. Vilinbakhova
St. Petersburg State University

1. Introduction

Originally, the word stereotype derives from two Ancient Greek roots: στερεός ‘solid’ and τύπος ‘impression’. It was first used by the French printer Firmin Didot in 1796 as a typographical term. Later, it became a part of everyday language (in the beginning, it was used mostly in the form of an adjective stéréotypé ‘stereotyped’) to describe repetitive situations that lacked originality or spontaneity.

In 1922, it was introduced into the social, cultural and psychological studies by the American writer Walter Lippmann in his book “Public Opinion”. He saw stereotypes as pictures in our heads which simplify reality: “[stereotypes] may not be a complete picture of the world, but they are a picture of a possible world to which we are adapted” (Ibid.).

Nowadays, the notion of stereotype is widely used in different areas, and even in linguistics, there are two major traditions of understanding it. The first approach defines stereotype as a fixed form, fixed expression, or even fixed text. According to the second approach, stereotype is seen as a fixed content, a fixed mental image of a person, an object or an event. Both definitions of stereotype share the same characteristic of stability, but it is either the stability of form or the stability of content (сf. the terms formal vs. semantic stereotype (Bartmiński 2005), Sprachstereotype ‘stereotype of speech’ vs. Denkstereotype ‘stereotype of thought’ (Gülich 1978), stéréotype de langue ‘stereotype of language’ vs. stéréotype de pensée ‘stereotype of thought’ (Schapira 1999), etc. My focus here will be on semantic, rather then formal, stereotypes.

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