VERBALIZATION OF CONCEPTS EVENT, SPACE AND MAN IN MEMOIR TEXTS

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of the cognitive and semantic space of concepts event, space and man in the memoirs of famous French memoirists of the last century: Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Daniel and Jacques Robert. The goal was to trace the spatial configuration of text concepts, their variable characteristics and role in the development of the text content of memoirs. Analysis of the texts of various authors proved that the peculiarity of the concept event is a combination of neutral and factual information with author’s subjective attitude to it. This statement is clearly seen in the concept event “Referendum” in S. de Beauvoir’s memoir novel “La force des choices II”, where well-known factual information is intertwined with the author’s selection of concepts of emotional (mainly negative) order: defeat, bitterness, joy, desolation, depression, pessimism, gloom, despair, overwhelming, disappointment, vain hopes, inevitability, curse, melancholy, horror, riot, scandal, disagreement, anxiety, depression, lack of concentration. Another categorical concept – space – performs a text-forming function, localizing the events described by memoirists spatially (in combination with the concept time, localizing events temporally). This localization occurs through intensive stratification of multi-level concepts: macroconcepts, mesoconcepts, cataconcepts. An essential component of all memoir texts is the megaconcept man since any reproduction of the past is associated with human activity: the author himself – the memoirist – or the one/those whom he describes. The authors of the studied memoir texts are well-known public figures who have a high level of speech culture and, consequently, powerful opportunities to influence the reader. Among such means of influence, it is necessary to distinguish variations in textual concepts of temporal, spatial, or emotional semantics. The memoirists themselves, however, as well as the numerous personalities they mention, associatively acquired the status of a concept due to their activities, their general publicity. The study allowed us to draw an important conclusion: variation of multi-level concepts of memoir texts contributes to their semantic and cognitive enrichment and makes the author’s subjective position of the memoirist more noticeable in the text space of memoirs. However, this study leads to a number of unresolved issues related to the informative basis of memoirs, cognitive periphery, dynamics of text content deployment, and, of course, the word play of this type of texts. All these questions are waiting for the future research.