NOTIONAL COMPONENT OF THE CONCEPT POLITICS WITHIN THE MODERN ENGLISH-SPEAKING WORLDVIEW

Abstract

The article researches into lingual and cognitive structure of the notional component of the concept POLITICS within the modern English-speaking worldview. Politics is one of the most important fields of human and society’s being. It is an open multisided unit of human cognition, which is in constant motion of forming its own content and is realized in multiple situations of communication. Being a unit of cognitive mapping, on the one hand, it embodies one’s personal experience, and, on the other hand, the experience of the whole community that reflects political phenomena in speakers’ minds. The research paper is aimed at analyzing definitions of linguistic representatives of the concept by studying English dictionaries and encyclopedias. This is done to single out the notional component and interpret the concept’s content. To achieve this goal, methods of definitional and component analysis are used. The concept POLITICS in the modern English-speaking worldview is the research object, while the structure of its notional component is the subject of our research. This enables to determine basic ideas about politics fixed in semantics of language units related to the political sphere of modern English speakers. According to lexicographic sources, the lexeme politics started functioning in the English language in the 14th century. In spite of its many synonyms, the nomen politics reflects the content of the notional component of the studied concept to the fullest. The abstract nature of this notion conditions appearance of several lexical units that form the nuclear zone of the concept – politics, policy, political, politician. Power, government, political activity, science, party, organization, state, country, leader, politician, the UN, globalization, crisis, human rights, global society and numerous other units form the periphery of the concept as they make the notion of politics more detailed and express its various aspects. The structure of the notional layer of the concept POLITICS is characterized by high nominative density, which is conditioned by its abstract and universal nature.