A METHODOLOGY FOR LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF CORE CONCEPTS IN MILITARY DISCOURSE

Abstract

The article examines military discourse as a cognitive-discursive formation that constructs a specialized worldview and demonstrates the capacity for discursive expansion within the contemporary public communicative space. The “core concept” is theoretically substantiated as a system-forming cognitive unit that ensures semantic coherence, axiological orientation, and reproducibility of military communication. The study proposes an original methodology for identifying and analyzing core concepts, based on a system of clearly operationalized identification criteria and integrating corpus-based, definitional, structural-cognitive, and discourse-analytical approaches. The proposed methodology is tested on the material of official oral military discourse in Russian, using the concept of WAR as a case study. The analysis demonstrates that, within the institutional context, war is predominantly conceptualized as a controlled and strategically organized process, while anthropocentric interpretations occupy a peripheral position. The findings make it possible to clarify the cognitive mechanisms of military world-modeling and to expand the methodological toolkit for the analysis of institutional discourses.