SEMANTIC ORGANIZATION OF THE CONCEPT "RULE OF LAW" IN INSTITUTIONAL DISCOURSE: ANALYSIS OF THE CO-OCCURRENT NETWORK BASED ON THE BCC CORPUS

Su S.¹, Ju Yu.²

Su S.

Shanghai International Studies University
201620, st. Wenxiang, house 1550
Shanghai, China
e-mail: 835117914@qq.com

Ju Yu.

Shanghai International Studies University
201620, st. Wenxiang, house 1550
Shanghai, China
e-mail: zhengzhengjuju@163.com

Introduction

Institutional discourse plays a key role in the construction of social reality in the modern system of organizational management. As V.I. Karasik notes, by its nature, such discourse represents status-oriented communication, based on social institutions and role distribution [3]. In this framework, the "rule of law" acts not only as a legal concept, but also as a significant unit of institutional discourse, possessing a pronounced organizing function. The social-cognitive theory of T. van Dijk also shows that institutions are capable of influencing public modes of representing concepts related to norms and order through certain discursive strategies [12]. Analysis of the linguistic characteristics of the "rule of law" in institutional texts is aimed at identifying how organizations, through rhetorical and lexical configurations, shape conceptual representations of rule and order.

In Russian scholarship, the linguistic and cultural content of the concept of "rule of law" has already received considerable in-depth development. In line with traditional Russian legal philosophy and political discourse, V.S. Nersesyants emphasizes that the rule of law is inextricably linked to the separation of powers, the limits of state authority, and the unconditional guarantee of individual rights [9]. In the Chinese context, the semantic organization of "rule of law" in institutional discourse reveals features that distinguish it from the traditional Russian philosophical and legal model. Research by Chinese scholars shows that Chinese discourse on the "rule of law" often combines political and moral dimensions, emphasizing the conjugation of "governance based on law" and "governance based on morality," as well as the functional role of law in ensuring holistic social development [14; 15; 16]. Therefore, a direct imposition of the traditional Russian semantic framework on Chinese material often proves to be insufficiently explanatory and does not allow for an accurate description of the specific ways of semantically organizing the concept of «rule of law» in Chinese institutional discourse.

The present study is based on the associative-semantic network model of Yu.N. Karaulov [4] and the framework analysis of E. Goffman [11]. In this paper, institutional discourse is considered not as an external thematic area in relation to organizational psycholinguistics, but as one of the main communicative environments in which the mechanisms of organized meaning-making become observable [8; 10]. If institutional discourse defines stable forms of normative, managerial and public communication, then organizational psycholinguistics allows us to explain how these forms of speech structure understanding, reinforce preferred directions of interpretation and reproduce socially distributed models of comprehension. On this basis, the article conducts a quantitative analysis of the co-concurrent structure, highly associated units and methods of semantic aggregation of the concept of the «rule of law» in an institutional context. The focus is on the semantic components that consistently co-occur with the «rule of law» and the methods of their structural unification into a relatively distinct conceptual model. Actual changes in individual attitudes and behavioral reactions of the recipients are not included in the objectives of the study.

Unlike studies that examine the "rule of law" solely as a political idea, legal principle, or normative slogan in a qualitative manner, this article focuses on the co-concurrent connections, structural positions, and modes of aggregation of this concept in specific institutional texts. This attempts to complement observations of the organization of the "rule of law" concept with a corpus-based, quantitative lens.

From an organizational-psycholinguistic perspective, this study addresses not only the semantics of a particular legal concept but also the verbal mechanisms through which institutional communication establishes relatively stable conditions for its understanding. For organizational psycholinguistics, it is fundamental that organizations do not simply convey ready-made meanings, but reproduce them through repetitive verbal configurations, normative formulas, standard combinations, and communicative frameworks. Therefore, an analysis of stable, concurrent connections around the unit "rule of law" allows us to consider institutional discourse as an environment of organized semantic influence, in which preferred directions of interpretation are consolidated, and the understanding of the concept becomes socially and communicatively structured rather than individually random.

Theoretical and methodological foundations of the study

Corpus source and pre-processing

Studying the expression and organization of concepts in real contexts requires, first and foremost, recourse to natural language data possessing the properties of genuine communication. An isolated word, removed from its living speech environment, does not adequately represent the accumulation and evolution of social meanings in historical and contemporary communicative spaces. This study utilizes the BCC Corpus of Modern Chinese at Beijing Language and Culture University as its empirical basis. This corpus, being one of the largest general corpora of Chinese, minimizes statistical distortions associated with its small sample size while offering a more detailed breakdown by register and social context. Given the objectives of the study, the newspaper and official business subcorpora were selected as the direct data sources.

The keyword "rule of law" is the central search unit. A co-occurrence window of [-5; +5] is defined for it, forming a list of co-occurring units and laying the foundation for further semantic relationship analysis. After extracting co-occurring fragments, morphological tagging and stopword filtering are performed. Since function words such as conjunctions, prepositions, and particles primarily serve a syntactic linking function, have low semantic distinctiveness, and can create noise in co-occurrence statistics, they are excluded during the pre-processing stage. Only the main notional parts of speech are included in the analysis: nouns, verbs, adjectives, and other meaningful units.

The choice of newspaper and official-business subcorpora is motivated by two circumstances. First, both types of texts possess a distinct institutional nature and exhibit characteristics of official communication, allowing for a fairly concentrated observation of normative modes of expression in the institutional environment. Second, they retain differences in genre, publication context, and addressee model: newspaper texts are closer to the public representation of institutional meanings, while official-business texts are more closely related to formalized administrative management and organizational functioning. Combining them makes it possible to identify the concurrent context and semantic organization of the concept of "rule of law" within a relatively stable array of institutional texts.

Quantitative measurements and network topological analysis

If the strength of the relationship between units is assessed solely by their co-occurrence frequency, the results will inevitably depend on the overall frequency of words. Some high-frequency units appear repeatedly in a wide variety of contexts, and their high co-occurrence frequency does not necessarily indicate a stronger substantive relationship. To mitigate the influence of the overall frequency effect, this study uses pointwise mutual information (PMI) as a key indicator of co-occurrence strength. This indicator captures the degree to which the actual probability of co-occurrence deviates from the expected probability under the assumption of statistical independence, where x is fixed as the central word "rule of law", y represents a candidate content unit within the co-competitive window, P(x, y) – the joint probability of their occurrence, and P(x) и P(y) – marginal probabilities of the corresponding units. The meaning PMI(x, y) > 0 indicates that the co-occurrence exceeds the level expected under independence; the higher the PMI value, the greater this deviation.

In contemporary studies of legal and institutional discourse, corpus-based methods are increasingly used to identify set phrases, register features, genre differences, and recurring patterns of language choice [13]. In this regard, co-occurrence analysis allows not only to describe the frequency environment of an individual unit but also to identify more stable configurations of semantic connections in specialized discourse.

The PMI indicator is sensitive to rare co-occurrences: even a small number of coincidences can produce an artificially inflated value. To reduce distortions caused by rare events, a two-stage filtering is applied. First, a co-occurrence frequency threshold is set. min_cooc ≥ 20, and then only those units are stored for which PMI > 3.0. At the lexeme selection stage, highly associated units are identified based on these criteria, with the words ranked highest by PMI used to describe the main associative characteristics of the concept "rule of law." At the network modeling stage, all units and all pairwise highly associated relationships that satisfy the specified thresholds are retained, after which a weighted semantic co-competitive network is constructed and visualized in Gephi.

To describe the structure of a co-optive network, this paper first clarifies the composition of its main elements. A network node is defined as a pre-filtered, meaningful lexical unit, and an edge is a statistically significant co-optive connection between two units within a given window. The degree of a node is defined as the degree of a graph vertex, that is, the number of edges directly connecting a given node to other network nodes: deg(v) = |N(v)|, where N(v) denotes the set of neighboring nodes of a vertex v.

To compare nodes, the standardized degree centrality is used: C_D(v) = deg(v)/(n – 1), Where n – the total number of network nodes. The higher the value, C_D(v), the greater the number of other units with which a given node is directly connected and the more noticeable its connecting position in the overall network structure.

Along with node degree, the work also uses weighted degree. It is calculated as the sum of the weights of all edges incident to a given node: s(v) = ∑_{u ∈ N(v)} w(v, u), where w(v,u) denotes the weight of the connection between nodes v и u. In this study, edge weight corresponds to the PMI value for a given co-occurring link after excluding units that do not meet the co-occurrence frequency threshold. Therefore, the normal degree reflects the breadth of a node's links, while the weighted degree reflects the combined intensity of its statistically significant co-occurring links. Using these two metrics together allows us to distinguish between units with many direct links and those whose links are not only numerous but also statistically more pronounced.

Each of these indicators performs its own analytical function. The PMI allows us to identify the most prominent co-optive connections in the immediate vicinity of the concept "rule of law"; the degree centrality and weighted degree reveal which units play the most significant connecting role within the entire network; and the Louvain algorithm allows us to understand whether these highly associated components form relatively stable internal clusters. Combining these three approaches allows us to simultaneously observe the distribution of significant semantic components, their position within the overall structure, and the nature of their thematic aggregation, creating a more holistic basis for discussing the concept's organization.

Psycholinguistic basis of interpretation

In psycholinguistics, particular attention is paid to how linguistic units and associated knowledge are activated during text comprehension. For this study, the focus is not on the entire range of psycholinguistic issues, but rather on the question of which recurring contextual connections may contribute to the formation of the conditions for understanding a concept. Therefore, co-occurring connections around the unit "rule of law" are considered textual indicators of stable semantic neighborhoods characteristic of institutional communication. This approach does not directly reconstruct the recipient's individual psycholexicon, but it does allow us to describe the discursive conditions in which this concept is regularly presented and interpreted.

L.S. Vygotsky and A.R. Luria proceeded from the fact that the meaning of a word is not a fixed dictionary unit, but unfolds as a process of meaning-making at the intersection of thinking and speech [1; 7]. A.N. Leontiev also emphasized that the formation of meaning is inseparable from a specific activity, task, and situation: understanding always depends on the communicative goal and contextual conditions [6]. Understanding of a concept is usually built on consistently repeating combinations and contextual connections; it is through them that the direction of its meaning gradually takes shape. In this paper, repeating co-concurrent relations in the institutional communicative space are interpreted as important signals for understanding the concept of "rule of law," and highly associated components are treated as relatively stable resources for its interpretation. On this basis, the structural connections and methods of aggregation between these resources are further examined using semantic network analysis.

It is important to emphasize that PMI is only an operationalized indicator of statistically significant co-occurrence at the text level; it is not identical to the strength of psychological association in the individual's mind. A.A. Leontiev insisted that comprehension is not reduced to the passive perception of frequency information, but involves the selection, combination, and organization of contextual cues [5]. A.A. Zalevskaya's research on psycholexicon also shows that the connections between words are continuously restructured under the influence of experience and contextual exposure [2]. Therefore, the subsequent discussion of high PMI units, high-centrality nodes, and community structure is limited to the interpretation of the conditions of comprehension, structural positions, and thematic aggregation of the concept of "rule of law" in institutional discourse and is not directly transferred to the level of individual emotions, value identification, or behavioral inclinations.

Features of the semantic organization of the concept of "rule of law" in institutional discourse

General distribution of high-frequency competitors

The results of extracting co-contestants from the newspaper and official-business subcorpora of the BCC corpus, selecting them by PMI, and then network clustering show that in institutional discourse, "rule of law" does not function as an isolated legal term, but is consistently included in several relatively stable semantic neighborhoods. If we examine the overall distribution of high-frequency co-contestants, the most prominent positions are occupied by units such as "comprehensive," "construction," "promotion," "in accordance with the law," "people," "system," "development," "management," "provision," and others. This indicates that fairly distinct directions of semantic aggregation have already formed in institutional communication around the concept of "rule of law.".

To illustrate the main co-concurrent contexts of the concept of "rule of law" in institutional texts, Table 1 presents representative highly associated units that satisfy the selection conditions.

Table 1. Highly associated co-contexts of the concept "rule of law"«

Rank	Chinese unit	Russian equivalent	Frequency	Semantic block
1	全面	comprehensive	18500	1. Construction and development
2	建设	construction	15420	1. Construction and development
3	推进	promotion	12300	1. Construction and development
4	发展	development	9850	1. Construction and development
5	现代化	modernization	6500	1. Construction and development
6	深化	deepening	6100	1. Construction and development
7	改革	reform	5800	1. Construction and development
8	社会	society	14200	2. Society and Harmony
9	人民	people	11200	2. Society and Harmony
10	保障	security	8900	2. Society and Harmony
11	公平	justice	7300	2. Society and Harmony
12	正义	justice	7100	2. Society and Harmony
13	稳定	stability	6800	2. Society and Harmony
14	和谐	harmony	5400	2. Society and Harmony
15	依法	in accordance with the law	13400	3. System and normativity
16	体系	system	10500	3. System and normativity
17	治理	control	9200	3. System and normativity
18	完善	improvement	8400	3. System and normativity
19	制度	institutes	7900	3. System and normativity
20	规范	regulation	5100	3. System and normativity
21	监督	supervision	4800	3. System and normativity
22	意识	consciousness	4200	3. System and normativity

Note: The words in the table are summarized based on co-occurrence results for the unit "rule of law" in the newspaper and official-business subcorpora of the BCC corpus; frequency serves as an indicator of the prevalence of the corresponding units in a given corpus array.

As Table 1 shows, the core of the competitive zone primarily includes units related to three areas: construction and promotion, social values, and institutional normativity. This generally aligns with the later division into semantic blocks.

In terms of frequency, the following units are particularly frequent: "comprehensive," "construction," "society," "in accordance with the law," "promotion," "people," "system," and "development." This means that in institutional texts, "rule of law" rarely appears as a purely legal concept and is more often included in expressions related to governance, development objectives, public order, and institution-building. This distribution indicates that the semantic content associated with "rule of law" extends beyond legal norms and rule enforcement in the narrow sense and extends to narratives about governance goals, social values, and institutional practices.

It's also significant that the most frequent competitors lack words with a pronounced punitive connotation—such as "punishment," "sanction," or "restriction." At least at the high-frequency level of institutional discourse, "rule of law" is significantly more often associated with development, governance, provision, and order than with a repressive dimension. This indicates a clearly organized and institutionalized direction of its conceptual expansion in the process of discursive representation.

Key nodes and their structural positions

To more accurately identify the key components of the "rule of law" network, the centrality and weighted degree metrics were compared. Based on the definitions provided in the methodological section, the node degree is used here to assess the breadth of each unit's direct connections, the centrality metric is used to standardize their comparison within the entire network, and the weighted degree is used to assess the cumulative intensity of these connections. Using both metrics together makes it possible to identify those units that occupy truly important positions in the overall network structure. For clarity, Table 2 presents the words with the highest centrality metrics, their weighted degrees, and their community affiliations.

Table 2. Ranking of key nodes of the semantic network «rule of law» by degree of centrality and weighted degree

Rank	Node label	Degree	Weighted degree	Degree centrality CD	Modularity class
1	cooperation	20	78.04474	0.036231884	6
2	justice	16	59.562093	0.028985507	20
3	proper execution	15	77.173359	0.027173913	4
4	Hong Kong	15	63.762153	0.027173913	16
5	well-coordinated	15	55.343022	0.027173913	18
6	moral governance	15	54.091527	0.027173913	18
7	equality	14	58.943759	0.025362319	12
8	activity	14	56.529311	0.025362319	8
9	justice	14	54.102224	0.025362319	20
10	efficiency	13	63.977079	0.023550725	6
11	prosperity	13	63.225459	0.023550725	1
12	international	13	52.187146	0.023550725	6
13	self-government	13	49.980271	0.023550725	18
14	safety	13	47.445526	0.023550725	20
15	consciousness	13	45.947111	0.023550725	4
16	Wednesday	13	44.277858	0.023550725	20
17	freedom	12	51.604031	0.02173913	12
18	nation	12	49.602815	0.02173913	1
19	party organization	12	48.761172	0.02173913	18
20	combination	12	46.56824	0.02173913	18

According to the results of calculating the nodal indicators, after threshold filtering, the weighted semantic network includes a total of 553 nodes. The top ranking by centrality degree includes such units as "cooperation," "fairness," "due execution," "Hong Kong," "well-functioning," "moral governance," "equality," "activity," "justice," "efficiency," "prosperity," "international," "self-governance," "security," "consciousness," and others. If the weighted degree is also taken into account, it is clear that "cooperation"« (Degree = 20; weighted degree = 78.04), "proper performance"« (15; 77.17), "justice"« (16; 59.56), "well-functioning"« (15; 55.34), "moral management"« (15; 54.09) and "justice"« (14; 54.10) are distinguished both by the breadth of connections and by their intensity.

In terms of structural distribution, the top positions are occupied not so much by highly specialized legal terms as by units related to public values, institutional improvement, and cooperative governance. Words such as "fairness," "justice," "equality," and "security" are predominantly associated with value-laden semantic components. In turn, "coordination," "moral governance," "self-governance," and "consciousness" gravitate toward blocks related to institution-building and governance concepts. Units such as "cooperation," "efficiency," and "international" are more often included in expressions related to organizational functioning, cooperative governance, and development. In other words, the most coherent nodes of the network are distributed across several different semantic directions and form a series of strong connecting points within the overall structure.

However, not all words ranked highly by centrality possess the same interpretative value. Units such as "due execution," "Hong Kong," and "prosperity," although highly coherent within this network, are more context-specific and have a narrower semantic applicability. Therefore, they cannot automatically be considered the most stable supporting units of the "rule of law" concept. Conversely, words consistently falling within the categories of construction and development, social values, and institutional normativity are more suitable for describing the structural core of this concept. At the level of results, it can at least be argued that the semantic components surrounding "rule of law" are unevenly distributed, clustering around a number of words with pronounced connective capacity, forming a fairly distinct structural hierarchy.

Identification of communities and semantic blocks

Based on pairwise highly associated links and the nodal structure, the Louvain algorithm allows us to further identify the modular characteristics of the "rule of law" concept network. Twenty-seven communities were identified in the current network. The largest of these are: community 6 (50 nodes), community 1 (47 nodes), community 4 (43 nodes), community 17 (42 nodes), community 18 (40 nodes), community 2 (38 nodes), community 20 (32 nodes), and community 16 (29 nodes). This means that highly associated units in the "rule of law" environment are not distributed flatly and uniformly, but are organized into a series of subgroups with relatively dense internal connections.

If we compare the most coherent units within these communities with their content, they can be reduced to three larger semantic directions.

The first direction is "construction and development." It is primarily represented by communities 6 and 2. Community 6's core consists of units such as "cooperation," "efficiency," "international," "institution," "innovation," and "design," emphasizing cooperative management, organizational functioning, and development. In community 2, units such as "path," "task," "key," "high quality," "deployment," and "responsibility" are more indicative of task advancement, strategic planning, and a developmental focus. Together, these two clusters form a semantic block linking "rule of law" with construction, promotion, managerial coordination, and modernization.

The second direction is "society and harmony." It is most pronounced in communities 20 and 16. Community 20 concentrates on words such as "fairness," "justice," "security," "environment," "creation," "transparency," and "life," with a semantic focus on public values, public order, and ensuring living conditions. Community 16 contains the terms "Hong Kong," "stability," "maintenance," "order," and "prosperity." Although these are tinged with more specific sociopolitical themes, they also generally revolve around maintaining social stability and order. Thus, the social block is not limited to a single semantic dimension, but includes both value representations and real-world governance scenarios.

The third area is "system and normativity." It is primarily formed by communities 18, 4, and 17. Community 18 includes such units as "efficient operation," "moral governance," "self-government," "party organization," "combination," "leadership," "grassroots level," "village," and "system," which rather condensedly expresses the integration of institutions, local governance, and normative organization. In community 4, the units "proper execution," "consciousness," "representation," "strictness," "mechanism," "implementation," "rigor," and "punishment" more closely refer to the implementation of norms and the consolidation of normative guidelines. In community 17, expressions such as "application," "creation," "law," "strategy," and "law-based governance" further demonstrate the connection between the concept of the "rule of law" and institutional strategy and legal discourse.

The clustering results thus provide a structural basis for the previously outlined division into three semantic blocks: "construction and development," "society and harmony," and "system and normativity." In other words, this division is not an arbitrary external classification, but is based on the internal modular organization of the network itself. Consequently, the semantic organization of the concept of "rule of law" in institutional discourse is characterized by both the relative stability of its macro-directions and the presence of more subtle submodules within them.

The organization of the concept of "rule of law" in institutional discourse

The main directions of the semantic organization of the concept of "rule of law"«

High-frequency co-contexts surrounding the "rule of law" are concentrated primarily around expressions such as "construction," "promotion," "in accordance with the law," "system," "management," and "provision." High-centrality nodes gravitate toward the areas of "fairness," "justice," "efficient operation," "moral governance," "cooperation," and "security." Clustering reveals that these components do not exist as a disparate set, but rather form several closely interconnected semantic modules within the network. When considering all three sets of results together, it becomes clear that in institutional discourse, the "rule of law" typically does not operate in isolation. It systematically appears in texts alongside expressions related to construction and development, public values, and institutional functioning, thereby forming a rather distinct configuration of connections. In other words, in institutional texts the concept of «rule of law» already exhibits a clearly expressed, organized semantic structure.

Looking at the distribution across communities, the most coherent units in communities 6 and 2 are concentrated around cooperation, efficiency, internationality, tasks, deployment, high quality, responsibility, and the like. This means that the "rule of law" is often situated within a narrative of construction, governance coordination, and development orientation. In communities 20 and 16, "fairness," "justice," "security," "environment," "stability," "order," and "prosperity" play a significant role, demonstrating the constant association of this concept with the public good, social order, and value-based legitimation. Finally, in communities 18, 4, and 17, words such as "efficient," "moral governance," "self-governance," "system," "implementation," "rigor," "law," and "law-based governance" place the "rule of law" within the context of institution-building, normative implementation, and governance procedures. Taken together, this allows us to conclude that in institutional texts, the «rule of law» is not a single legally restrictive concept, but a multidimensional semantic structure, simultaneously linked to development, public values, and institutional normativity.

The obtained results allow us to clarify the position expressed in the introduction regarding the conjugation of "law-based governance" and "moral governance" in Chinese institutional discourse [15; 16]. In the network structure, this conjugation is manifested not as an external addition of moral issues to the legal concept, but as an internal connection between normative-legal, managerial, and value components. Thus, the units "moral governance", "self-government", "consciousness", "combination", "system", "execution", and "law-based governance" are included in the block of institutional normativity and are associated with the broader areas of public order, justice, and managerial coordination. This demonstrates that in the analyzed institutional texts, the "rule of law" is represented not only as a legal principle, but also as an element of a comprehensive governance model, where legal regulation is correlated with moral norms, collective responsibility, and the tasks of social development. At the same time, these data should be understood precisely as the result of discourse-network analysis: they demonstrate the stability of textual connections between legal and moral-administrative components, but do not allow us to directly judge changes in the individual linguistic consciousness of the addressees.

This conclusion is based on co-occurrence links, the intensity of unit connections, and the results of community identification. The observed data show that components related to the "rule of law" not only frequently coexist in the text but also form a relatively stable organization within the network.

Stable structure and situational shifts

The network data reveals that some highly coherent nodes are consistently distributed around the themes of "fairness," "justice," "security," "well-functioning," "moral governance," "self-governance," and "cooperation." These components primarily relate to public values, institution-building, and cooperative governance, thereby forming relatively stable structural pillars of the "rule of law" concept. However, some other highly central units—for example, "Hong Kong," "proper execution," and "prosperity"—are significantly more dependent on the specific situation and thematic context. Their emergence is more closely linked to specific historical narratives, political formulas, or textual habits. The simultaneous presence of both groups of units demonstrates that the semantic organization of "rule of law" in institutional discourse is neither completely homogeneous nor entirely closed: it is formed around a number of stable themes, but at the same time is constantly influenced by specific communicative scenarios and current social issues.

When these two groups are considered together, a dual characterization of the conceptual organization of the "rule of law" in institutional discourse emerges. On the one hand, units such as "fairness," "justice," "security," "well-functioning," "moral governance," "self-governance," and "cooperation" are repeated with high regularity and form a stable semantic framework. On the other hand, the inclusion of words such as "Hong Kong," "proper execution," and "prosperity" demonstrates that this structure is capable of incorporating units dictated by a specific period, political episode, or proliferation scenario. Consequently, the concept of "rule of law" in institutional discourse combines relative stability with openness to situational reconfiguration.

Conclusion

This article attempts to describe the semantic organization of the concept "rule of law" in institutional discourse. The results demonstrate that in the institutional context, this concept does not function as an isolated unit, but is consistently included in a number of highly associated semantic components. Data on high-frequency competitors and the results of PMI selection indicate that the immediate semantic context of "rule of law" is primarily concentrated in three areas: construction and promotion, public values, and institutional normativity. This means that the conceptual content of this word already extends beyond the narrow legal term and is increasingly embedded in the institutional discourse of development, management, provision, and order.

A topological analysis of the network further reveals that the semantic components surrounding the concept of "rule of law" exhibit quite distinct signs of structural aggregation. The highest centrality and weighted degree indices belong to terms related to fairness, justice, security, institutional well-being, ethical governance, self-governance, and cooperation. This suggests that these terms serve a greater role as connective tissues within the network. The results of Louvain clustering demonstrate that, at the intermediate organizational level, the network of the "rule of law" concept breaks down into several internal modules with relatively dense connections, while at the macro level it can be reduced to three main semantic blocks: "construction and development," "society and harmony," and "system and normativity." Thus, the concept of "rule of law" in institutional discourse exhibits pronounced complexity and multi-layeredness.

From the perspective of organizational psycholinguistics, the results demonstrate that institutional discourse serves not simply as a channel for transmitting legal information, but as a mechanism for organizing collectively significant meanings. Stable co-opetition, highly centralized nodes, and a modular network organization indicate that in institutional communication, the concept of "rule of law" is systematically embedded in recurring semantic contexts, thereby acquiring a relatively stable interpretative framework. This, in fact, is the organizational-psycholinguistic significance of the analysis: it reveals how preferred modes of conceptualization are entrenched in organizational discourse, which semantic resources become foundational for understanding, and how, through repeated discursive structures, a socially distributed model of understanding the "rule of law" is formed.

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