Opposition as separate entity in historical discourse (using an example of conflict/agreement concepts)

This article is intended to study the binary opposition of Russian and English “conflict” and “agreement” concepts. Their functioning in historical discourse has text-forming and discourse-forming potential which gives them conceptual nature. The relevance of this research is attributed to this following factors: the historical discourse being independent is yet one of the least researched in theory of Discouse Analysis, thus it's interdisciplinary nature allows us to research it as a variety of institutional discourse; the fact that opposition is a universal semantic category opens prospects for researching it as a text-forming and discourse-forming category; oppositions “conflict” and “agreement” functioning in historical discourse do not only form the network of concepts in this discourse, but create an intermediate unit of this binary opposition, which is represented by the concept “negotiations”. The novelty of the research arising from identifying the ways of actualization of opposition network in English and Russian historical discourse. In this research we analyzed linguistic and extralinguistic factors of the enantiosemy emergence, as the word capability to have the auto-antonym. In the consequence of this empirical and theoretical research we discovered the intermediate component of binary opposition “conflict” and “agreement” represented by the concept “negotiations”. The oppositions in historical discourse form the network of concepts “relations” which has the conversive relationships (i.e . the conflict may lead to an agreement and agreement may lead to the conflict which is possible by the existence of the intermediate unit “negotiations” mentioned above and its contents such as “armistice” and etc). In this work we found that in the Russian and English languages the meanings of the metaphors are the same but are different on a deeper level, which may be explained by the differences between the cultures in linguistic world image which could be found in the discourse activity of communicators belonging to different cultures.