Темпоральная семантика слова “общество"

Социологическое обозрение. 2015. Т. 14. № 1. С. 68–104.

Durinova G.

It would not be an exaggeration to assume that the Begriffsgeschichte-studies (history of concepts) are spreading now through practically all fields of the Humanities. Its initial proposal was to explore the sociopolitical lexicon as a tool for creating history. It paid a lot of attention to the idea of untranslatable concepts in every particular language, despite the fact that they often have the same Latin or Greek root (like society, société, società, sociedad etc.). But the cases where one word is supposed to convey the meaning of the Latin root by using a root original to this given language are still relatively not well explored. Such the case of the Russian language where the concept of society initially was expressed by the word obschestvo derived from the Slavic root “obsh-” meaning “common”.

We suggest that from the linguistic point of view the traditional question “when does the word obshestvo obtain its sociopolitical meaning?” should be replaced by the following: what meaning of this Russian word had become a political one? To answer this question, we should explore the proper linguistic conditions of this transition. This means finding out how it is possible to arrive from the constructions like «the community of the wellness» (obshestvo blaga) to the following pattern: “the thoughts of the society”, “the soul of the society”, “the suffering society”. 

Keywords: history of concepts, история понятий, историческая семантика, lexical semantics, temporal semantics, когнитивная лексическая семантика