COGNITIVE DIFFERENTIAL FEATURES OF CENTRAL VERBALIZERS IN THE CONCEPT OF TRAUMA

Abstract

The relationship between thinking and speech has been studied with various scientific-based approaches for a long time. Cognitive linguistics, which considers language as a means to verbalize thoughts, transmit information, and also as an important key for better understanding of the nature of cognitive processes in human thinking, ranks equally with psychology, psychiatry, medicine, sociology in human mind studying. Linguistic analysis helps to understand better which associations cause certain words, expressions or phenomena in the minds of speakers living in the community, having similar history, cultural development, communicating in the same language. The TRAUMA concept, which is currently being researched from different scientific directions, requires careful study of cognitive linguistics in order to understand the reason for its growing popularity. The article is devoted to the analysis of the definitions “category”, “classifier”, “cognitive features” in the framework of linguocultural and linguo-cognitive approaches. Based on the theoretical knowledge of three scientific styles, the cognitive differential features of central verbalizers in the TRAUMA concept are highlighted in order to understand typical features a person relies on during decoding the concept of trauma in English. The Helen Kubryakova’s Nomination Theory, the linguocultural approach of S.D. Popova and I.A. Sternin, and J. Lakoff point to the technologies of concept research, determing the universal cognitive categories inherent in all concepts, classification categories, by analyzing which it is possible to distinguish the differential features of the concepts centre and periphery. The article uses the cognitive differential methodology to analyse the features of central verbalizers in the TRAUMA concept based on 6 modern lexico-ghaphic sources to establish images that are fixed in consciousness regarding traumatic events, conditions of committing a trauma, actors, consequences and explanation of the experience, which is gaining through the interpretation of the environment, being in a state of extreme shock, unexpectedly unpleasant feelings. The material of this article will be used to carry out the contextual actualization of the TRAUMA concept in the works “Olivia Kitteridge”, “And Olivia Again” to determine the individual author’s concept of TRAUMA, understanding the peculiarities of the trauma worldview by the writer E. Straut.