Linguotheologemes and Linguoculturemes in Contemporary Linguistic Consciousness: a Corpus-based Study of miloserdie and bodrstvovanie

Abstract

This article presents a comparative analysis of the semantic range of selected lexemes across secular and religious discourse. The relevance of this inquiry is predicated on the necessity to elucidate the category of the sacred within the Russian language system. For the first time, the term linguotheologeme is operationalized as a verbalized invariant unit constitutive of religious consciousness. Employing componential and contextual methodologies, the study investigates the semantic specificities of the lexemes bodrstvovanie (wakefulness / vigil) and miloserdie (mercy / compassion) across two distinct discursive domains. The empirical basis comprises over 200 usage contexts extracted from the Russian National Corpus alongside canonical theological texts. The findings demonstrate that within mundane discourse, bodrstvovanie functions as a monosemantic item denoting a physiological state of wakefulness, whereas its deployment in religious registers signifies spiritual vigil (duxovnoe bdenie). Conversely, it is shown that while miloserdie in secular parlance denotes an altruistic readiness to assist driven by compassion — thereby functioning as a linguocultureme — within the religious framework it constitutes 'service to one's neighbor as service to God,' representing a soteriological virtue and thus qualifying as a linguotheologeme. The authors conclude that polysemy arises diatypically: identical lexical items exhibit significant semantic divergence contingent upon their embedding in either secular or religious discourse. It is further posited that the linguocultureme serves as a semiotic marker of secular consciousness, whereas the linguotheologeme indexes specifically religious modes of conceptualization.