The semantics of terrorism: notional profile of language expression

Abstract

Nowadays, terrorism represents a substantive social threat on a global scale -many interpretations of this phenomenon function in a multidisciplinary dimension. Most of them come to understanding terrorism as an intended action aimed at intimidating and influencing. However, the term remains without an agreed-on definition, shaped to satisfy different legal bodies and the public. Furthermore, the difficulty of its interpretation is also complicated by blurred boundaries of the terrorism impact after its incursion into cyberspace and the establishment of multiple upgraded and trickier forms of terrorism. As of 2022, terrorism, unexpectedly for most of us, appeared among the core concepts that shape Ukrainian reality.By this article, we open a series of research papers on conceptualizing, categorizing, and verbalizing information terrorism practiced in the context of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Being a kind of cyberterrorism, information terrorism poses great hazards to the common wealth, global stability, and sustainability. We believe that to combat information terrorism, civil society must primarily be fully aware of what terrorism is per se. By studying the lexical actualization of the concepts ТЕРОРИЗМ / TERRORISM, we aim to get a deeper insight into the phenomenon by approaching it from the perspective of linguocognitology that tends to explain the concepts of reality grounding on their verbalized reconstruction in both language and discourse.Within the semantic-cognitive approach, a concept is a cognitive formation constituted of three layers: notional (informative), figurative-associative, and interpretative. This particular research is devoted to comparative analysis of the notional layers of ТЕРОРИЗМ / TERRORISM-concepts as reflected in Ukrainian and English. This layer accumulates the core factual characteristics of the concept, the most considerable ones for the fact of reality related to the concept that helps distinguish a particular concept within the whole conceptual field.