IMAGINATIVE-EVALUATIVE COMPONENT OF THE CONCEPT “PANDEMIC” IN THE ENGLISH-LANGUAGE MASS MEDIA DISCOURSE

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of imaginative-evaluative constituent of the concept “pandemic”. The study is based on a three-layer model of the concept structure, which includes conceptual, image and value components. The current paper focuses attention on considering the means of verbalization of the imaginative-evaluative component of the concept “pandemic” in the Englishlanguage mass media discourse. The mass media discourse is an important source of objectification of the imaginative-evaluative component of the concept, which is due to the specificity of the said discourse, its focus on reflecting the phenomena and events of current social reality with the use of various means of representation, including metaphor. The article discuses the imaginativeevaluative component of the “pandemic” concept, its lexical verbalization in the mass media discourse. The imaginative-evaluative component of the “pandemic” concept has been analyzed on the basis of 300 articles devoted to the pandemic problem, selected from the websites of BBC News, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, The Guardian, The Independent, The Times, and The Washington Post in the period from February 2020 to January 2023. The analysis of mass media discourse articles enabled us to determine the main associative images of the “pandemic” concept, which are represented in the form of cognitive metaphors. As a result of the study, there have been determined that the imaginativeevaluative component of the concept “pandemic” in the English-language mass media discourse is objectified in the form of cognitive metaphors, namely: PANDEMIC – WAR, PANDEMIC – KILLER, PANDEMIC – FIGHT, PANDEMIC – NATURAL PHENOMENON, PANDEMIC – MONSTER, PANDEMIC – GENIUS MONSTER. The cognitive metaphor PANDEMIC – NATURAL PHENOMENON contains specifications such as: PANDEMIC – AVALANCHE, PANDEMIC – TSUNAMI, PANDEMIC – CYCLONE, PANDEMIC – STORM, PANDEMIC – CLOUD, PANDEMIC – FIRE. The research findings allow concluding that all the presented cognitive metaphors revealed a negative axiological assessment of the pandemic in the English-language mass media discourse, since the concept “pandemic” is associated among representatives of the English-speaking community (British and Americans) with an existential threat, war, tsunami, etc., the reaction of which is influenced on the formation in the minds of representatives of the English-speaking linguistic culture of appropriate metaphorical images that find their representation in the linguistic picture of the world.