THE COGNITIVE STRUCTURE OF A TERM «ГРАЖДАНИН» [CITIZEN] IN RUSSIAN CONSTITUTIONAL INTERTEXT

Abstract. Constitution is a discursive representation of a law and political view of the world, so it has a complicated structure based on crucial concepts. One of them is «гражданин» [citizen], as it concerns on the mutual relationship between a person and a state. The concept and the term, which represents it in the language, is the object of our research. The aim of the investigation is to compare cognitive structures of the notion «гражданин» presented in the variants of the Russian constitutional intertext; the last are the material of the research and include texts of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialistic Republic Constitutions, published in 1918, 1925, 1937 and 1978, and the Constitution of the Russian Federation, published in 1993. Any text is considered as intertext, or a system of direct and indirect citations, so a constituton is an intertext as well. Due to the comparison of co-referential citations, the term «гражданин» as an intertextual unit can be followed in the aspect of its development. To investigate the notion structure, the prototypical method is used from the cognitive perspective: firstly, the significatum is defined, which is the whole of the basic features of a concept: then we define the real object, which the notion refers to, or a referent. After the prototypical significatum and referent are separated, as they present the ideal, the central part of a cognitive structure; so they form the structure, organizing the other its elements having the part of prototypical significatum around them. So, the cognitive structure consists of a nuclear presented with the element of a notion having the whole prototypical significatum, near-nuclear part including the elements with a considerable part of prototypical significatum, and the periphery with a small amount of prototypical features. Each of the parts can be divided into some more fractions having different semantics. The results of the research show that the cognitive structure «гражданин» reveals the polysemy of a notion investigated, but the amount of the meanings presented in terms of the concept, gradually diminishes, which demonstrates the tendency to monosemy and homogeneous semantics with a small amount of significatum features.

Keywords: intertext, constitution, significatum, prototypical approach, cognitive structure