Genre and discourse conditionality of concept meaning (on the example of the concept ‘youth’)

Abstract

The article deals with variational nature of concepts on the example of the concept ‘youth’. The authors show that concepts as knowledge storage structures are modified under the influence of communicative usage and discourse preferences peculiar to different spheres of communication and genre forms. The analysis is based on the contexts selected from the National Corpus of the Russian Language with the differentiation of texts by types (functional spheres) and genre varieties. The selections from the newspaper sub-corpus (the texts of the federal and regional media) and from the main sub-corpus are limited by the modern period – the texts of 2015–2022. It was proved that different types and genres of speech are heterogeneous from the point of view of the actual meaning of the concept ‘youth’ revealed in them. The authors demostrate actualization of different semantic components and their combinations, as well specific placement of semantic emphasis within the boundaries of the same semantic components. The analysis has revealed the importance of a quantitative distribution according to genres and types of discourse. It is based on the quantitative data that we can elicit the semantic components and their correlations which are the most relevant (frequent) for an individual type of discourse and its genre variations – considering that the elements of conceptual content appearing in the texts of the same time sample are superficially similar. The authors argue that concepts are units of communication which are fully defined only on the level of their discourse realization and that concepts represent not a rigid structure with a fixed set of components but a probability of interconnections which are specifically manifested in different types and genres of speech.