CONCEPT A WORK OF GENIUS IN THE WORLD VIEW OF THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING SOCIETY

Abstract

The article is dedicated to the investigation of the verbalization of the concept A WORK OF GENIUS in the world view of the English-speaking society. The study is based on general explanatory dictionaries of the English language, specialized dictionaries and encyclopedias, English artistic, publicist and scientific texts, as well as the British National Corpus. The English conceptual field GENIUS consists of three segments connected by a cyclic relationship. Each of these segments is denoted by a corresponding nuclear concept: GENIUS as a phenomenon, GENIUS as a person, and A WORK OF GENIUS. The ontological cycle consists of the following three parts: 1) a person endowed with 2) the gift of genius creates 3) a masterpiece that is recognized as a work of genius (in art or science), and this gives its creator the status of a genius. The nuclear components of the structure of the given concept are almost identical in both versions of the world view, which indicates the stability and universality of the key characteristics of the phenomenon of genius in the picture of the world of English-speaking society. The nuclear components reflect extraordinary mental and creative abilities of a genius and originality of his work. At the same time, the naive picture of the world demonstrates the existence of a rather voluminous periphery in the structure of the corresponding concepts, in which evaluative and often opposite in content features predominate. The relatively small amount of peripheral features of all nuclear concepts in the scientific picture of the world is accounted for by the fact that in scientific discourse the most frequent conceptual features are nuclear components. We see the prospect of the research in the possibility of further studies of geniuses in the paradigm of linguopersonology, contrastive linguistics and psycholinguistics.