LINGUAL-COGNITIVE PARAMETRES OF ENGLISH LOCATIVE IDIOMS DISCOURSE USAGE

Abstract

The article focuses on discourse functioning of locative phraseologisms related to phraseological transformations. It analyses the structural-semantic character of transformations and attendant cognitive factors. Idioms are universally recognized as unique means of secondary nomination, since they provide verbal fixation of the results of conceptualizing spatial relationships through non-spatial terms (fields of human knowledge). When providing spatial world conceptualization, the locative idioms involved not only primary spatial code, but also secondary units of different cultural codes, i.e. anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, biological, temporal, etc). Idioms proper are often referred to as a “texts in text”, since they are verbal embodiment of culturally-relevant senses, so called micro-texts, the nominative base of which involve various types of information (denotative, emotive, grammatical, stylistical, motivational, evaluative).

There’s a number of studies focusing on analyzing how discourse functioning affects idioms’ structure, semantics and cognitive contents. Therefore, the research presented is targeted at disclosing the productive types of discourse modifications of locative idioms.

The research yielded the following results: the most productive type of structural-semantic modifications are such as: addition, elimination and / or substitution of components. According to these semantic and structural modifications, the following conceptual alterations may occur: the idiomatic conceptual meaning may be either verified or neutralized, specified, modified or left unchanged. The research performed has enabled to increase the list of conceptual referents of orientational metaphors and, consequently, to broaden scientific views on a particular concept of human knowledge, i.e. SPACE, represented in the English language.