Concept Democracy in the Speeches of the World Leaders in the Context of Russian-Ukrainian War

The article reflects the results of the reconstruction of the concept DEMOCRACY in lexicographic sources and analysis of its actualization in the speeches of Joe Biden, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Ursula von der Leyen, and Volodymyr Zelensky in 2022 from the perspective of the Russian-Ukrainian war. Based on the component-semantic analysis of the definitions of the lexeme democracy in eight English-language explanatory dictionaries (Cambridge Dictionary, Oxford Learner's Dictionary, Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, Macmillan Dictionary, Collins Online Dictionary, Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary and Thesaurus, The Chambers Dictionary, Etymology Online Dictionary) was modeled, which includes core fields (people’s government та system of government), near (country, equality, right to vote) and far (freedom) periphery fields. The study of twelve selected speeches (67 pages of printed text) also made it possible to single out one more field of the far periphery – fight, which is actualized as a result of the objectification of such features of the concept as democracy under threat, union, protect/defend democracy, protect/defend freedom as a result of rethinking the concept of DEMOCRACY in the context of Russia's aggression against Ukraine. It was determined that in the speeches of world leaders in 2022, the concept of DEMOCRACY is verbalized with the help of tokens democracy, people, vote, elect, free, freedom, country, etc. The analysis of the features and frequency of their use indicate that the lexeme democracy in relation to other verbalizers prevails in the speeches of the American president, as evidenced by the number of the word usage – 111 times and Ursula von der Leyen's – 27 times; lexemes people (65 word usages) and country (64 word usages) dominate the speeches of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss; in the speech of Volodymyr Zelensky, free, freedom and people are the predominant verbalizers, which indicates the current priorities in the concept components for representatives of different nations. Contrasting the concepts of DEMOCRACY and AUTOCRACY to characterize Ukraine and its people and the aggressor country and its leader, respectively, reflect changes in the perception of Ukraine and Ukrainians on the world stage

Democracy · Linguistics · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Ukrainian · Discourse Analysis and Cultural Communication · Global Political and Economic Relations · History · Law · Philosophy · Ukrainian Cultural and Linguistic Studies