Concept fight in political discourse of Russia and America

This article is devoted to the study of the concept as a way of modelling the politicians' image. The study is based on thepolitical discourse of Russia and the USA, namely, on the material of G. W. Bush's and V. Putin's interviews. The author of the articleanalyses the ways of the representation of the concept "fight" in the politicians' speech and describes the structure of the concept as acombination of lexico-semantic fields (including micro-fields, lexico-semantic groups and subgroups). The author has singled out thefollowing lexico-semantic fields forming the concept "fight": 1) fight as an armed conflict, 2) fight as an argument, 3) fight as anattempt to prevent or stop something, 4) fight as an attempt to achieve something. Each field, its nominants and micro-fields arethoroughly described and analysed in the article. The lexico-semantic field "fight as an armed conflict" is represented only in G.W.Bush's speech. The feature of explicating of the concept "fight" in his speech is a close connection of the notions "fight" and "war". Therepresentatives of the lexico-semantic field "fight as an argument" are found only in V. Putin's speech. In the process of the analysisthey were divided into four micro-fields. The broadest lexico-semantic field is the field "Fight as an attempt to achieve something". Itwas divided into micro fields a) "participants of the fight" and b) "kinds of the fight" that includes lexico-semantic groups ("politicalfight" and "sport competition") and subgroups. The analysis of the politicians' interviews shows the following results. The core of theconcept "fight" in V. Putin's speech is the lexico-semantic field "fight as an attempt to prevent or stop something", which is followed bythe fields "fight as an attempt to achieve something" and "fight as an argument". The core of the concept "fight" in G.W. Bush's speechis the lexico-semantic field "fight as an armed conflict", in which the words "fight" and "war" have almost the same meaning. Therepresentatives of the field "fight as an attempt to achieve something" are also influential for G.W. Bush's verbal image. In 90% of thesentences on the theme of fight the politician means political war. From the point of view of the image structure described in the worksof O. Issers and based on the stereotypical accepting of the politician by people [11], the image role of "the fighter" can be marked in theverbal image of every politician, the speech of whom was analysed in the article. In this case it should be mentioned that politiciansunderstand the notion "fighter" differently. It is proved by different structures of the concept "fight", combinations and features oflexico-semantic fields included. The explication of the concept "fight" is one of the ways to form the verbal image of a politician.

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