The concept “military/armed conflict” in terms of foreign language teaching methods

Armed conflicts occurring in the world should be analyzed from different points of view including linguistic understanding of the concept “military/ armed conflict”. The objective of the study is to find the ways to develop university students’ skills to model the concept “military/ armed conflict”. The process of teaching students to construct the concept involves three stages: 1) shaping the topical sphere of the concept with the help of scientometric analysis of journal articles and media texts; 2) demonstrating the procedure of concept modelling; 3) collecting the lexical units from media texts, analyzing their meanings for making concept model; comparing the structure and the content of German and Russian concepts. The scientometric method implied to the concept analysis allows figuring out the most general topics connected with the concept. Political issues, international relations, society, education, religion, health and medical problems, history, security are the most frequent general topics connected with the concept under study. The continuous sampling method is used to select and collect the language means related to the concept “military/ armed conflict”. To construct the concept the modelling method is employed. In the concept structure the core, semicore and peripheral zones are distinguished.


Introduction
Both sustainable development in particular and social and economic development in general are possible in the countries that are not involved in wars or military conflicts. People's insecurity, conflicts of different nature are considered to be the main threat to any positive changes, progress, and development. Goal 16 on the 17 Sustainable Development Goals clearly states the idea of societies living in peace and justice. The conception of peaceful, calm, harmonic life must be delivered to the younger generation through education. According to Goal 4 education gives young people the opportunity to improve their lives and obtain sustainable development of their communities. One of the fundamental aims of education is to pass humanistic, moral and social values on to the youth. Such values imply utter and absolute rejection of the war as the greatest evil. In the training process all school and university courses can be used for antiwar propaganda, for instance, language disciplines provide a wide range of opportunities to understand the essence of the war reflected in the concepts of a certain language.
Contemporary linguistic studies have given more or less distinct definition to the notion of the concept. The concept in linguistics is understood as a mental unit accepted by every member of the nation and stored in the collective consciousness with the help of language means, mostly the vocabulary [1]. From the viewpoint of cognitive linguistics, the concept is recognized as a unit of knowledge, a quantum of mentality, element of individual's consciousness. The process of thinking is bound with concepts that become operating units of thought as person's knowledge and activity experience make content of concepts. Therefore, the larger and richer the cognitive sphere of an individual, and the more abstract his mentality, the bigger his conceptual world picture.
Most scholars point out to the specific national and cultural nature of concepts. Thus, the concept is believed to have a cultural sense and a lexical meaning that makes it a broader linguistic phenomenon than a word (Z. Nemickien) [2]. It is considered as an element of common national cultural inherence expressed in the language [3]. The universal and national criterion is the main condition for classifying concepts (V.A. Maslova) [4].
Phenomena, objects, entities of special significance -common, cultural, axiologicalcan form a concept (Yu. S. Stepanov) [5]. A. Wierzbicka associates the concept with objects from the ideal world which are manifested in their names and influence the nation's cultural understanding of real world [6]. Concepts are of dual nature: on the one hand, they are a part of the collective cognitive sphere; on the other hand, they are a possession of an individual. So, they are kept in the word stock of the national language and verbalized in personal speech. Lexical units of all kinds (words, collocations, all types of phraseological units), stylistic means and devices are a subject of concept investigations. A lot of national cultural conceptual information contains in proverbs and sayings [7]. Concepts are containers for various estimations, values, and associations [8]. That proves V. Evans's maxim that the concept intermediates the reality and a vocabulary [9]. V. Nezornak specifies the main feature of the concept consisting in its ability to reflect the national picture of the world in a word [10].
The concepts "war", "military/ armed conflict" are a part of concept systems of different nations, but its volume, inventory, and content may vary.
The conceptual paradigm of the war includes such notions as military/ armed conflicts, military/ armed confrontations, hybrid wars, etc. Moreover, it is necessary to note that nowadays the concept "war" is very often substituted by the concept "military/ armed conflict", as both concepts have very much in common.
Thus, both a war and a military/armed conflict can be internal (civil), local (between two regions), and international (between more than two countries).
Students living in countries in which and between which there have been no wars or armed conflicts for a long time, should be aware of the system of the concepts "war", "military/ armed conflict" for a number of reasons: • to obtain an accurate understanding of the consequences of a military/ armed conflict; • to develop a serious, thoughtful attitude towards military threats; • to gain understanding of the reasons for unleashing wars, military/ armed conflicts, both external and internal; • to acquire and develop moral priorities, personal ideas about wars, military and armed conflicts; • to get functional value guidelines that ensure the generational continuity.
In language classes students can be taught the linguistic components of the concept "military/ armed conflict" consisting of the core, semicore and peripheral zones with the use of authentic materials from the media.
Military/ armed conflicts are studied from different points of view due to their varieties and diversities. Thus, the classification of armed conflicts is worked out; it includes international, non-international armed conflicts, as well as transnational armed group conflicts (N. Al Anbuge) [11]. Transnational armed conflicts and their classification as non-international armed conflicts are discussed in the article by D. Carron [12].
D. Kharakalova touches upon some special aspects related to an armed conflict. The author argues when more than two parties living in the same region/ community are involved in a conflict, the third participant always happens to be present in the conflict procedure to some extent. According to the UN Charter, a war is permissible only in cases of individual or collective self-defense; or in the event of hostilities on the basis of a UN Security Council Resolution [13]. P.S. Kazarin points out that a war, an armed conflict, a military conflict have distinct characteristics. A military conflict is understood as a form of resolving interstate or intrastate contradictions with the use of military force (the concept covers all types of armed confrontation, including large-scale, regional, local wars and armed conflicts). An armed conflict viewed upon as an armed clash of a limited scale between states (international armed conflict) or opposing parties within the territory of one state (internal armed conflict) [14].
In our opinion, the concepts "military conflict" and "armed conflict" are practically identical, thus we use the double notion of military and armed conflict.
Armed conflicts and education have common points of contact which are the subject of a number of researches. For example, the educational process in Yemen, which was subjected to the destructive influence of the military conflict that affected teaching and learning activities is analyzed (A.A. AlMunifi, A.Y. Aleryani) [15]. It is stated that children living in the regions involved in wars or armed conflicts suffer from steady stress and fear that influence their cognitive abilities (S.Y. Diab, J.-H. Schultz) [16].

Research methodology
The purpose of the research is to find the most effective ways to teach students how to construct the concept "military/ armed conflict". The concept study is based on the materials of the German and Russian press, news reports from German international television and radio companies, as well as news materials from the Russian news agency RIA Novosti and Russian radio stations and TV channels. Media texts contain a great number of language units that can be used for the comparative analysis of their linguistic meanings, the description of the characteristic features of the concept under study at all language levels of German and Russian, and the identification of its intercultural aspects. This research covers the lexical means of the concept.
To outline the topical spheres of the concept "military/ armed conflict" the scientometric analysis was applied. The abstracts of 9,181 articles published in two decades of the 21st century and stored in the Web of Science (WoS) scientometric database were observed.
The continuous sampling method was used to select and collect the language means related to the concept "military/ armed conflict". The examples were extracted from the German and Russian media texts.
To construct the concept the modelling method was employed. In the concept structure the core, semicore and peripheral zones are distinguished (Z.D. Popova, I.A. Sternin) [17].
The core zone of the concept includes lexical units that represent the direct meaning of the concept; the semicore zone contains lexical units that are indirectly related to the meaning of the military/ armed conflict, such as phraseological units, synonyms, antonyms, tropes (allegory, hyperbole, litota, metaphor, metonymy, oxymoron, personification, paraphrase, synecdoche, comparison, epithet). The core and semicore zones form the central zone of the concept, its kernel consisting of generally accepted concepts, assessments and associations, and represent a national component in the structure of the concept. The peripheral zone of the concept consists of personal evaluations, images and associations and forms its individual component.

Findings
1. The concept "military/ armed conflict" is of great importance in university language courses as it verbally reflects the threats for sustainable development in the world. For instance, German classes give a good opportunity to study this concept. Authentic media texts, academic papers describe different aspects of military/ armed conflicts, the reasons of unleashing a war, a military/ armed conflict which can be of both an external and internal character, and the ways to prevent conflicts.
The process of teaching students to construct the concept "military/ armed conflict" should be divided into several stages. The first stage is devoted to outlining the main topics of the concept. They can be figured out by analyzing articles in different sources, for example, in the mass media or in the scientometric databases. In the Web of Science (WoS) database the articles touched upon the following fields of knowledge: -international relations -2,269 articles; -political science -2,166; -law, legal relations -1,475; -history -510; -public environmental occupational health -488; -social and interdisciplinary sciences -446; -regional studies (area, territory studies) -437; -economics -426; -general internal medicine -323; -sociology -308; -humanities -193; -education and training -140.
All these fields of knowledge cover the topical sphere of the concept "military/ armed conflict". It can be seen that the largest number of articles touches the field of international and legal relations, which can be explained by the significance of the phenomenon of a military/ armed conflict for the modern world political situation During the further training process students are offered to find topical spheres of the concept under study in media texts. Thus, the most general topics connected with the concept "military/ armed conflict" are political issues, international relations, society, education, religion, health and medical problems, history, security.
The second stage of teaching students how to study the concept is to show the procedure of its modelling. For example, in the article "Cyber-Armeen in Nahost: Diffamierung als Waffe" taken from the Deutsche Welle daily newspaper there are 387 lexical units that are related to the general idea of a military/ armed conflict. The words and word combinations are distributed among the zones of the concept.
The same concept model can be designed with the help of texts extracted from the Russian press. For instance, considering the RIA Novosti news item "Capture the Frontiers" with the subtitle "There is a new player in the dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan" it is possible to single out 485 lexemes connected with the concept "military/ armed conflict".
The semicore zone comprises the words and collocations: -peaceful and diplomatic means, settlement plan, border zones, disputed areas, OSCE Minsk Group, trilateral ceasefire agreement, territorial integrity.
In the peripheral zone the lexemes and idioms implicitly connected with the concept are concentrated: -illegal invasion, another exacerbation, "election rhetoric", indignation, sympathy.
In the Russian concept there is a more saturated core zone, since, in our opinion, linguistic means express a direct relationship to the described event.
The semicoer zone contains linguistic means of a neutral diplomatic character; the peripheral zone, in turn, is characterized by emotionally colored lexical units. They are fewer than in the German-language concept.
The third stage of the concept study process requires students' activities connected with deliberate choice of collecting the proper media texts, searching the lexical means that express the concept "military/ armed conflict" with further analysis of the concept and its modelling.

Discussion
Concepts are inner mental entities manifested in the verbal form. The significance of concept studies in linguistics is proved by a great number of observations that are now at the disposal. The problem of the concept structure is of a paramount importance. Most scholars point out to its complexity. Yu. S. Stepanov describes the concept structure as layered [5]. G. Slyshkin and V. Karasik consider it as a multidimensional construct. They model the concept as a four zone system, they distinguish two main zones consisting of intra and extra subzones and two additional ones that are termed as quasi zones [18]. According to V. Evans the field feature is the key principle for the concept organization [9]. There is a point to hold to the view point of the zonal structure of the concept. Thus, it consists of the kernel that includes two zones -the core and semicore zones, and the peripheral zone.
According to Z.D. Popova and I.A. Sternin, the core of the concept is the primary, most discernable verbal images, while the periphery embraces more abstract notions, words [17].
The core of the concept includes lexical units that directly characterize the concept "military / armed conflict" and are unambiguous strong markers of this concept.
The farther the distance from the concept core the more its imaginative, emotional component increases. For the most part, the lexical units of the peripheral zone are expressed in complex words.
The chosen structure is appropriate to teach student to model the concept "military/ armed conflict" using German and Russian media texts.

Conclusion
The UN global long-term paradigm of sustainable development implies peaceful and secure life for all nations and communities. Wars and military/ armed conflicts are considered to be the main hazards of sustainable development. University students should be aware of all threats that prevent people on the Earth to live, get education and develop their personalities and their communities. The language university course includes the possibility to examine wars and military conflicts with the verbal point of view.
Students should develop their skills to understand the topical sphere, the content, and the structure of the concept "military/ armed conflict".
The process of teaching students to construct the concept "military/ armed conflict" involves three stages: -shaping the topical sphere of the concept with the help of scientometric analysis of journal articles and media texts; -demonstrating the procedure of modelling the concept; the concept model involves core, semicore, peripheral zones; -collecting lexemes, idioms, and collocations from media texts, analyzing their meanings for making the concept model. Development of students' skills to model the concept "military/ armed conflict" makes it possible to analyze a significant amount of Russian and German media texts and study and classify lexical units included in related concepts.