COGNITIVE-SEMANTIC FEATURES OF THE LEXICAL-SEMANTIC CREATIONS IN THE FRENCH LANGUAGE

Abstract

The article is dedicated to the research of the semantic features of language units, the part of which is the element mal-, and also the description of cognitive processes by native speakers during the process of valuation of the language units for the nomination of the new objects of reality. The frequency of appearance of such items causes the extension of compilations of such elements with other parts of speech. It shows the extralinguistical ability which is based on psychological comfort during the usage of two well known elements. Such cognitivepsychological process provokes the increase of derivations according to this model. In the opinion of N. Chomsky the people nowadays suffer from negative emotions, unconsciously they are influenced by their negative experience. In the process of creating new nomination, transcategorisation is one of the basic cognitive means, which ruins the traditional categorization chain and leads to appearance of new system-meaning connections and relationships. These connections change our visualization of the stable connection between the elements of language. The realty doesn’t change, but its several fragments could be considered in this process differently. This cognitive process is basic for creation the negative nomination with mal-. High circulation the wordbuilding models with prefix mal- is determined by different cognitive backgrounds. The paper deals with compound words. From the psychological point of view, it’s more convenient for the speaker to use the compound word from two well known words than to use the word combination. Most compound words with word-building element -mal are particularly old, they are made from words well diffused in French language speaking countries (ex: malhabile, malchance, malheur, malpropre, malhonnête, malgracieux). Moreover, these words are the result of connection of two elements – verb and adverb in the past or present (mal-voyant, mal-logé) or adverb plus adjective (malhabile). It means, the word malbouffe is the first construction with word-building element mal-, with a well known noun. This neologism starts the further construction of compound words with mal-.