On the sense of duty as a language-specific concept (in the focus of the National Russian Corpus)

Abstract

The article explores a sense of duty as a language-specific concept in the Russian language conscience. In this regard, the National Russian Corpus is more appropriate because a conceptual configuration of an analyzed concept is not present in “finished” form in any single utterance but may be reconstructed only on the totality of all possible utterances. The specific conceptual configuration is manifested in many ways: distribution, ability to accumulate some Russian “key ideas”, predisposition to be associated with some emotional attitudes, propositional and metaphorical models. According to the National Russian Corpus, a sense of duty is defined, in different contexts, in relation to human responsibilities such service and work ; related concepts such responsibility, conscience, dignity and honor ; related emotions and feelings such pride, joy, celebration, obedience, fear and guilt. The propositional model, built on the National Russian Corpus, includes information that predicates applied to duty vary with the position in the syntactic structure of the proposition. As a semantic object duty is felt, carried, carried out, executed, violated, transgressed, known, remembered and forgotten. As a semantic subject duty is redefined over the categorical boundaries in terms of propositional models appropriated for an inner voice, human being, breaking load, or power.