Lexical representations of the “soldier/fighter” concept in language and speech

INTRODUCTION. The research relevance is due to the need to study the linguistic means of representing one of the iconic mental units of the military conceptual sphere – the “soldier/fighter” concept, which is currently an integral part of the media space. The aim of the study is to describe the lexical representations of the “soldier/fighter” concept in the Russian linguistic picture of the world, to identify the features of its representation in modern newspaper discourse, as well as in the artistic (poetic) literature of the Soviet period and the present. MATERIALS AND METHODS. The research material includes lexicographic sources: explanatory and aspect dictionaries of the Russian language, the Great Soviet Encyclopedia; publications of the “Argumenty i Fakty” and “Komsomolskaya Pravda” newspapers; a collection of poems about the Great Patriotic War by Soviet poets; A.T. Tvardovsky’s poem “Vasily Terkin”; collections of poetry of modern times devoted to the special military operation in Ukraine. Descriptive and comparative methods, the method of analyzing dictionary definitions of concept representatives, the method of functional and stylistic analysis of linguistic units, contextual analysis, the continuous sampling method, and the statistical method are used. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION. The lexical-semantic, syntagmatic, paradigmatic and functional properties of the soldier and fighter lexemes, the main representatives of the concept of the same name, which is part of the “war” and “army” macroconcepts and reflects the Russian military worldview, are identified and described. CONCLUSION. The soldier and fighter lexemes are polysemic and share common semantics. The common Slavic fighter has been used in Russian since the 19th century, and the borrowing of soldiers has been used since the 17th century. The soldier has a highly expanded word-formation nest, as it has numerous derivatives. The fighter is part of the word-formation nest of the beat lexeme. In modern newspaper texts devoted to the special operation in Ukraine, the word fighter is the most frequent. The soldier is more often used in newspaper publications dedicated to the participants of the Great Patriotic War. Both words are widely represented in the poems of Soviet and modern poets of military subjects.