CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS OF ‘CIVIL SOCIETY’ IN ENGLISH ACADEMIC DISCOURSE
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17721/2520-6397.2024.2.11Keywords:
civil society, concept, conceptual analysis, metaphor, discourseAbstract
The concept civil society has been known to specialists in the field of humanities since the time of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome and has been elaborated ever since as a philosophical, political and sociological term. Its significance varied. Much as it was important in the 18th and 19th centuries, it yielded its leading position in the 1920s – 1960s. It started to become ever more popular in the 1980s onward as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the beginning of democratic transition of post-Soviet countries and the developing world. Nowadays, vibrant social movements are shaking up developed Western states and the concept of civil society that seemed to be well-crystallized continues evolving.
This research fills in the gap in cognitive linguistics by applying conceptual analysis to distinguish the ways of conceptualizing civil society in texts that belong to modern English-language academic discourse. The study reveals that conceptualization of civil society occurs according to the three patterns. Civil society may be presented in academic discourse as a part of social world where it forms a binary or a tripartite opposition to counterparts such as political society, traditional/barbarian state, business, family or clan. The second way of verbalizing the concept depicts civil society as a problem-solving tool and draws on metaphors. It may appear as a cure/panacea, a leverage over opponents, a school, a core of democracy or a state (Volunteerland). The third type of defining the concept lies in listing the bodies that fall into the category of organizations seen as civil society. Yet, by choosing the third, rather straightforward method to delve into the concept, scholars tend to introduce the list with the initially metaphorical “a web of/a network of”. By doing so, the researchers focus on not only the organizations or groups that represent civil society but also suggest that these bodies maintain relations of interaction and interdependence.
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