A semantic trajectory of the word soznaniye ‘consciousness’ in Russian and its methodological implications

The concept of an “invisible hand” driving lexical-semantic change is deeply entrenched in contemporary cognitive linguistics and sociolinguistics. That said, numerous instances of sociocultural significance reveal identifiable visible factors that influence these changes. This article examines the semantic evolution of the word soznaniye ‘consciousness’ from the early nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century in Russian. The study utilizes the Russian National Corpus and the complete works of Vissarion Belinsky, a prominent Russian literary critic from the mid-nineteenth century, as primary data sources. The findings indicate that in early nineteenth-century Russian, the term soznaniye primarily conveyed two meanings — ‘awareness’ and ‘confession’ — while in contemporary Russian, it encompasses a variety of conceptual metaphors, with the container metaphor being the most prominent. The article argues that Vissarion Belinsky played a crucial role in this transformation, as his innovations significantly altered the perspective and were subsequently integrated into general language use. An important factor driving this shift was the sociocultural demand for secular alternatives to the concepts of dusha ‘soul’ and serdtse ‘heart’.