Conceptual and integrative model of the Ossetian phraseosystem as a hierarchy of cognitive strategies for encoding experience

Abstract

The article is devoted to the development and verification of a conceptual and integrative model of the Ossetian phraseosystem representing the fundamental binary opposition “friend – foe”. The aim of the study is to describe the architectonics of the phraseological system of the Ossetian language as a hierarchy of four interrelated cognitive strategies for encoding ethnocultural experience: epistemological signification, axiological scaling, cross-domain mapping, and interdiscursive transfer. The relevance of the work is due to the need to overcome the limitations of descriptive, lexicographic and comparative approaches to Ossetian phraseology and to move towards cognitive and discursive modeling. The empirical basis consists of 182 phraseological units of the Ossetian language selected from lexicographic sources according to the semantic criterion of the presence of the “friend – foe” opposition (khion vs. ætsægælon), followed by corpus verification on texts with a total length of 8,028,980 word usages. The article presents a step-by-step algorithm for constructing the model, reveals the content of each of the four cognitive strategies, and provides the results of their testing on empirical material. It has been established that the phraseological system of the Ossetian language demonstrates a stable axiological asymmetry in favour of the concept “friend” (59 % of the corpus) and functions according to inverse cognitive patterns in which archaic figurative and associative connections, transformed through the internal form of the phraseological unit, transition into logically grounded value-normative structures.