THE COGNITIVE MODEL OF THE POLITICS CONCEPT (ON THE BASIS OF THE ENGLISH-LANGUAGE COCA CORPUS)

Abstract

The article reveals the mechanism of reconstructing gradually the POLITICS cognitive model as initial conceptual information equated to the denotative meaning that is activated in American mind by the politics lexeme, which in the process of applying certain cognitive operations is transformed in the field concept model via the formula “core – periphery”. As an authentic research material, a randomly selected 1000-context sample of the politics word is taken from the Corpus of Contemporary American English to define logical predicates (associated with POLITICS) through the methodology “semantics of lingual networks” (SLN) by S. A. Zhabotynska, and they are further thematically sorted by propositional schemas of five basic frames – the thing, action, possession, identification and comparison ones. The obtained schemas generate the POLITICS conceptual model that is further processed through the operations of prominence (by R.W. Langacker) and cognitive interpretation (by Z. D. Popova and I. A. Sternin) for bringing subsequently corresponding cognitive features. The latter, with abstracting to cognitive classification features, stand for the POLITICS content that is arranged in the field format “core – close – far – extreme periphery” by frequency of features realized in the discourse sample. Simultaneously, the POLITICS content is translated into the POLITICS macrostructure where the image component, information element and interpretation field are established. When the research is being implemented, the author describes a range of made decisions. Firstly, author’s own ideas are shown as to reasonability of analyzing certain limits of semantical valency of the politics lexeme with other words (namely semantically adjacent and non-adjacent collocations of POLITICS within the contexts). Secondly, a considerable attention is paid to the fact that each context may give several propositional schemas. Thirdly, the corpus sample is not divided into metaphorical and non-metaphorical resources. Besides, peculiar links between the SLN methodology and the semantic-cognitive analysis are discussed in the article as well. Eventually, the quantitative results of cognitive operations are analyzed post factum for finding out what is the most important in the POLITICS concept within the American community.