Introduction. The article is devoted to the research of the media cognitive category "sovereignty" in the modern political discourse. The political narratives were the study material. They were taken in the amount of 980 documents from the official online newspaper Kommersant of 2021-2022.
The aim of the article is linguistic and discourse modeling of the media cognitive category "sovereignty" in the modern political discourse.
Methodology and research methods. Adhering to the traditional three-term division into discursive, communicative and lexico-grammatical levels of description for communication science, we present the communicative-discursive model “sovereignty” based on the materials of the official Russian media in 2021–2022. The article uses the research methods of linguoconceptology, linguoculturology, such as modeling concepts, methods of component lexical analysis that help to establish the seme composition of individual lexemes; and there is also lexicographic analysis.
Results. According to the analysis, the media cognitive category "sovereignty" is represented as a multicomponent structure consisting of a certain set of elements, parts, components, although the full structure is not declared or described. This leads to the conclusion about inaccurate, deliberately distorted modeling from the media. The article shows that modern political discourse provides a field for information war and models the category "sovereignty" haphazardly, non-terminologically, replacing and obscuring the meanings of the power, state, nation, people, private industries and human livelihood. Metaphorically, the political category "sovereignty" in the official media names and tries to explain the most complex phenomena of our modern world, but it does it with a great deal of uncertainty and vagueness, maximally generalizing and masking the meanings necessary for public consciousness in order to manipulate in the information war. “Sovereignty” seems to be a kind of participant in “combat” operations of this war, it takes a certain side and has enemies and allies, it is attacked, but it, in turn, defends itself, needs protection and support. The category "sovereignty" as a tool of manipulation dictates, directs perception, makes perceive current events in a distorted way, serves as a manipulative scale of evaluation and value.
The scientific novelty of the study lies in the systematization of various aspects of the representation of the sovereignty category as a fragment of the world's political picture.
The practical significance of the study lies in the use of modeling methods for various text-discursive fragments in the communicative and linguo-discursive aspects, which is aimed at clarifying existing models and constructing and interpreting the latest ones.