THE CONCEPT ЕДИНСТВО/ИУДЗИНАД IN THE NORTH AND SOUTH OSSETIAN POLITICAL DISCOURSES: THE COMPARATIVE ASPECT

The study of ideological concepts in the political discourse of historically divided ethnic group, North and South Ossetians, is a new direction in political linguistics. The article is devoted to revealing cognitive features and ways of verbal representation of the political concept единство/иудзинад, the significance of which is extremely high for the small ethnic group of the North Caucasus (Republic of North Ossetia) and Transcaucasia (Republic of South Ossetia). The scientific novelty of the undertaken research consists in the fact that for the first time a comparative analysis of the concept единство/иудзинад cognitive development vectors in the North and South Ossetian political discourses is carried out in the aspect of ethnospecificity of the conceptual component, issues of a coordinating bilingual representation of South Ossetian political communication are examined, extralinguistic factors are revealed, and the development of ethnic political concepts derived from universal cultural concepts, described the semantic and cognitive features affecting the bilingual embodiment of a new type of concept in the political picture of the world of South Ossetians. The authors identify verbal representatives of nuclear and perinuclear cognitive features, foerming the concept единство/иудзинад structure. The material of the study is etymological and explanatory dictionaries data of the Ossetian and Russian languages, media materials, official documents and speeches of party and state leaders of the republics, as well as lyrics. Based on discursive, semantic-cognitive analysis, conceptual, etymological, comparative approaches and field modeling, the features of semantics and etymology of the lexemes единство and иудзинад in the Russian and Ossetian codes of bilingual residents of the republic are analyzed. The data obtained allowed us to model the structure of the concept, which is formed by conceptual, metaphorical and symbolic and value layers. The reported study was funded by RFBR and MES RSO according to the research project № 19-512-07002 (10-МК/19).