“Civil war” concept verbalization in contemporary American political discourse

Aim. To identify the structure of the concept of “civil war” and its verbalization features in contempo­rary American political discourse. Methodology. The research is based on the application of textual, contextual and conceptual analysis methods. Results. During the research, it was concluded that the core of the meanings of the concept “civil war” includes “division” and “extreme violence”. The meanings “confrontation” and “chaos” can be referred to as the peripheral ones. The analysis of the corpus of social and political journalistic texts has shown that the representation of the “civil war” concept can be carried out explicitly and implic­itly, as well as at the level of interaction of linguistics and general semiotics in audiovisual form. In addition, the analyzed concept representatives may refer to vocabulary denoting the concepts of “in” and “out”, pejorative vocabulary, as well as “color markers” words. Research implications. Based on the results of the work, a model of conceptual analysis of modern American political discourse was proposed and its implementation in practice was demonstrated.