Discursive construction of the concept «President of Russia» in Russian political discourse

Abstract

The foundation and development of a new state, Russian Federation, and a new president system is accompanied by the implementation of new political concepts, updating and rethinking of political vocabulary, processes of (re)ideologization of words. That's why it's important to explore interconnection between language and ideology. The purpose of this article is a cognitive analysis of the ways of discursive construction of the concept of «President» in Russian political discourse. The corpus includes 7 Russian Presidents' Inaugural Addresses by B. Yeltsin, D. Medvedev, V. Putin. The inaugural Address is an ideological text about perfect project of future and an inauguration is one of the forms of symbolic political actions expressing dynamics of social relationships and collective values. Drawing on discursive analytical approach, linguistic pragmatics and cognitive linguistics we examine 1) semantic development of the word president in the Russian language and Russian political discourse, 2) linguistic means which are used to explicate knowledge on (self) identification (Who is the president?), action (What does he do?) and affiliation (What subjects refer to president) in order to identify prototypical and variable elements of the political concept of “President of Russia”. Our findings indicate that the execution of the President's office is an extremely responsible matter. The actions of the President are motivated by duty and have a moral (ethical) basis. The prototypical actions of Russian presidents are expressed by verbs of speech activity, social activity and interpersonal relations. Certain subjects refer to the President office: 1) country; 2) voters who show attitude (approval, hostility) to the presidential candidate; 3) symbolic signs of power; 4) labor activity; 5) political activity; 6) ethical categories.