LINGUISTIC REPRESENTATION OF THE CONCEPT HUMAN INTELLECTUAL ACTIVITY IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN ENGLISH
Abstract
This study investigates the linguistic representation of human intellectual activity in English through a comprehensive cognitive and synonymic approach, examining how mental processes are encoded within lexical networks and semantic fields. Drawing on cognitive linguistics principles established by G. Lakoff, R. Langacker, and V. Evans, this research analyses synonymic relationships, semantic clusters, and paradigmatic structures within the conceptual domain of intellectual endeavours. The investigation employs corpus-based analysis using the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) to examine distributional patterns, collocational preferences, and frequency distributions across 45,000+ instances of intellectual activity terminology. The study reveals a hierarchical three-level semantic organisation comprising superordinate categories (general cognitive, analytical reasoning, creative synthesis, reflective contemplation), basic-level categories (problem- solving, decision-making, understanding, learning), and subordinate specifications (intensive, durational, evaluative, and modal variants). Network analysis demonstrates small-world properties with “think” functioning as a central prototype around which more specific terms organise through family resemblance relationships. The research identifies systematic metaphorical structuring through three primary conceptual mappings: THINKING AS PHYSICAL MOVEMENT, THINKING AS MANIPULATION, and THINKING AS VISION, supporting embodied cognition principles in semantic organisation. The findings confirm prototype-based category structure predictions from cognitive linguistics and demonstrate the utility of synonymic approaches for revealing fine-grained semantic distinctions. This research contributes to understanding semantic field organisation, conceptual metaphor theory, and usage-based language acquisition, with implications for lexicography, language pedagogy, and computational semantic modelling.
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