The dynamics of the lexeme Sanktionen as a key word for politically-legal restrictive discourse in German
In the modern German language, the word “die Sanktionen” is a key word of the political-legal restrictive discourse. The subject of the study is the dynamics of the meanings of the lexeme “die Sanktionen”, used in modern German primarily in the plural. The analysis of contextual examples of the usage of the German lexeme “Sanction” allows us to state that as a result of the semantic derivation of the meaning of “die Sanktionen” in the plural, the lexeme goes beyond the framework of international law and trade and becomes a marker of political communication for measures aimed at restriction, isolation and prohibition. As a method of investigation, a combination of discourse analysis and corpus-based analysis was chosen, the article first demonstrated the usability of the “die Sanktionen” in different meanings, as a tool the modern multilevel model of the linguistic-descriptive analysis "DIMEAN" was used for the first time. The aim of the study is to linguistically interpret the concept “die Sanktionen”, identifying its dominant role in modern German and defining it as a key word used for the nomination of restrictive measures in the political sphere. Since the beginning of the 21st century, the discourse-driven use of the “die Sanktionen” in the context of various political events, has become more frequent in the German-language media. In Modern German, “die Sanktionen” has become a widely used, key marker of political discourse, yet its use is often associated with broad interpretation, which will be demonstrated in the paper and illustrated by corpus-based analysis of this lexeme's co-occurrence and distributive environment. The paper concludes that in German the “die Sanktionen” is conceptually connected with rethinking of the concept of "guilt". This change will be shown on the analysis of the statistical results of the research of keywords, actors and objects of restrictive measures.