Lexical “portraying” of cognitive concepts

Moscow Region State University, 10A, Radio str., Moscow, Russia

^* Corresponding author: angela-1309.m@yandex.ru

Abstract

The article is devoted to the cognitive emotiological concept of pride. The relevance of the study lies in the fact that the compilation of conceptual lexical “portraits” and their subsequent comparison in different languages will reveal the similarity and difference in the natural language metaphysics of the compared cultures. Developed new author’s technique of “lexical portraying” of the concept determines the novelty of the research. The linguistic material of the research was the data from the corpus dictionaries “British National Corpus (BNC)” and “Russian National Corpus (RNC)” which represent a collection of grammatically marked texts. The first part of the article highlights the relevance of the study, defines the term “emotiological concept”, as well as provides general and specific for this area of research discussion issues from the field of cultural and cognitive linguistics. The authors analyze the interpretation of the term “concept”, the scope and content of this meaning and the ways of its description. The second part of the article is devoted to the study of the cognitions of “a proud man” and “a prideful man”. The authors conclude that the actualization of emotional feelings occurs under the influence of both external (socially conditioned) and internal (psychological) factors – the “provocateurs”. The third part presents the results of the cognitive analysis of the concepts “pride” and “гордость”. To provide this the authors refer to the definition of the realeme (a unit of the given lexical system). The ontogeny of the characterological behavioral qualities of “a proud man” and “a prideful man” is traced, and the amount of semantic and pragmatic information is established. Based on the analysis of the empirical vocabulary data and the considered connotations of lexical units “pride” and “гордость”, the authors propose a new type of “lexical portraying” and provide in the article the sample of one for the concepts “pride” and “гордость”. The developed etymological entry of the concept indicates 1) the cognitive elements of the concept, 2) the socio-cultural elements of the concept, 3) the semantics of the concept and 4) the syntax of the concept. The article dwells on emphasizing the fact that it is the cognitive elements that are universal for both Russian and English, while sociocultural, semantic, and syntactic elements might not always coincide in different natural language metaphysics. In conclusion, the authors summarize the data of the study and outline the promising areas of work in the field of concept science and cognitive linguistics.