ETHNO-SPECIFIC CONCEPT OF SOUTH-OSSETIAN POLITICAL SPACE

Abstract

The study of ethnic concepts functioning in a young country political communication a is a new direction in political linguistics. The article is devoted to revealling the cognitive features and ways of verbal representation of the eth-nospecific political concept фэзндаг/road, the significance of which is extremely new for the mountainous country of Transcaucasia - the Republic of South Ossetia. Scientiic novelty of the research undertaken is that for the irst time the South Ossetian political discourse study is carried out in the aspect of ethnospeciic conceptual component, issues of a coordinating bilingual representation of South Ossetian political communication are examined, extralinguistic factors that entail the emergence and development of ethnic political concepts, derived from universal cultural concepts are revealed, semantic and cognitive features that affect a new type of concept bilingual functioning in the South Os-setian political picture of the world is described. The authors identify the core of the concept фэндаг / road, the Transkam subconcept, which manifests the only highway connecting the country with the outside world through the Republic of North Ossetia. As research material, data of etymological and explanatory dictionaries of the Ossetian and Russian languages, the press of the Soviet period and the present, media materials, speeches of party and state leaders of the republic are used. Based on discursive, semantic-cognitive analysis, conceptual, etymological, and comparative approaches and ield modeling, the national features of фэндаг and road lexemes semantics and in the Russian and Ossetian codes of bilingual residents of the republic are analyzed. The obtained data allowed us to model the structure of the concept, which is formed by notional, igurative-perceptual, metaphorical and evaluative layers and symbolic components.