Concept Yugra in the Russian National Corpus

Abstract

This linguacultural analysis examines the semantic content of the concept Yugra in contemporary Russian discourse. While recent advancements in corpus linguistics have enabled the design of dynamic models for language and discourse phenomena, onomastic concepts remain largely understudied. The linguacultural reconstruction of Yugra as a field structure relied on 5,503 instances extracted from 2,388 texts across various subcorpora of the Russian National Corpus (including the Main, Newspaper, Poetic, Academic, Spoken, Historical, and Social Media corpora). The methodological framework integrates corpus-statistical analysis, contextual-semantic methods, and the conceptual field organization model developed by Z.D. Popova and I.A. Sternin. The distributional and semantic results were analyzed using both quantitative and qualitative methods. This comprehensive approach revealed the core cognitive features of the Yugra concept and the connections between them, which demonstrated a pronounced semantic disparity. The core (90.8% of contexts) was shaped predominantly by data from the newspaper corpus, which was dominated by lexemes with commercial semantics, specifically Yugra Bank (41.35%). The near periphery (8.7% of contexts) proved to be semantically stable and defined a territorial component. The far periphery (0.4% of contexts) retained the historical, archetypal national core. Consequently, the Yugra concept has undergone a significant transformation: from a traditional ethnotoponym, it has evolved into a modern economic brand with a dual nature, merging industrial modernity with cultural archaism and hinting at the future expansion of its semantic potential.