VERBALISATION OF LEGAL CONCEPTS IN THE TEXTS OF UKRAINIAN CONSTITUTIONAL DOCUMENTS OF 1917–1918 IN THE CONTEXT OF STATE-BUILDING HISTORY
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17721/folia.philologica/2025/10/10Keywords:
jurilinguistics, conceptual picture of the world, linguistic picture of the world, legal segment of the picture of the world, concept, verbaliser of a conceptAbstract
The article examines verbalisation of legal concepts belonging to the legal segment of the worldview as represented in the constitutional texts of the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UPR) and the Ukrainian State of Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky. These materials offer valuable insights into the history of the ideological formation of Ukrainian statehood during the National Liberation Struggles of the early twentieth century. The theoretical and methodological foundation of this study is the idea that verbalisation at various linguistic levels (word, phrase, sentence, text, system of texts) reflects a set of notions significant for collective consciousness (the worldview) and interconnected with one another – a system of concepts, or a conceptosystem. In this framework, concepts characterised by higher frequency and generalising (generic) semantic functions in relation to others (specific concepts) may function as macroconcepts. For the first time, the author attempts a linguoconceptological modelling of the system of legal concepts represented in such exceptionally important documents of the era of the National Liberation Struggles as the Universals of the Central Rada of Ukraine, the Constitution of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, and the Constitution of the Ukrainian State (Hetmanate). The study highlights the continuity of conceptualisation and verbalisation of law in the principal legislative documents of earlier periods – those of Kyivan Rus and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Rus’. The aim of the study is to model the constitutional law conceptosystems verbalised in the texts of the Universals of the Central Rada of Ukraine and the Constitution of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, on the one hand, and the Constitution of the Ukrainian State (Hetmanate), on the other. The primary research methods include the descriptive method (classification of legal lexicon according to different lexical stems), the linguoconceptological method (interpretation of lexical characteristics as instances of verbalisation of legal linguomentality), and modelling (reconstruction of the system of conceptual verbalisers of legal-culture concepts). Linguoconceptual analysis of Ukrainian constitutional documents of 1917–1918 – the Universals of the Central Rada of Ukraine, the Constitution of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, and the Constitution of the Ukrainian State – has made it possible to identify a number of regularities in the functioning of the legal segment of the conceptual and linguistic worldviews of the time, namely: (1) the documents of both the democratic Central Rada and the monarchical Hetmanate verbalise the exceptionally important (macro)concepts INDEPENDENCE and STATEHOOD for the Ukrainian worldview of the period; (2) the constitutional acts of both state and legal systems are oriented towards the conceptualisation of the Ukrainian legal experience of the past; (3) the key (macro)concept of the legal worldview of the Ukrainian People’s Republic is DEMOCRACY = LIBERTIES, whereas the key (macro)concept of the legal worldview of the Ukrainian State of Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky is CENTRALISATION = MONARCHY; (4) the continuity of legal conceptualisation in earlier Ukrainian legal systems determines the continuity of the verbalisers of concepts. The linguoconceptological analysis carried out makes it possible to compare the two state and legal models of the National Liberation Struggles of early twentieth-century Ukraine. Although both models arose almost simultaneously on the ruins of the Russian Empire, they reflected distinct tendencies of state- and law-building. The democratic model, lacking a clearly conceptualised state leader, proved significantly less resilient to extremist external threats; however, the second model, which was potentially more stable, depended on the support of the German Empire and likewise proved unviable. This suggests that linguoconceptological analysis of constitutional documents that verbalise the system of fundamental state and legal concepts may have prognostic value.
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