"Emotion" in the Russian and English language pictures of the world

Abstract

The article describes the functioning of the concepts "emotion" in Russian and English. Emotion as a phenomenon of reality has a multifaceted logical nature, is culturally, lexically and axiologically conditioned. The structure of concepts that can be evaluated as equivalents formalizes the categorization and conceptualization of reality, shows a predisposition to interact with cross-cultural concepts. The existing reality is reflected by a set of nuclear and peripheral meanings of the concept "emotion". The meanings of words illustrate the presence of main and secondary signs, monocentricity and predisposition to the formation of diverse associative connections, which determines the boundaries of semantic variation of the word. In the English language picture of the world, the verbalization of the concept of "emotion" shows signs of a behavior marker, properties of a liquid substance, assessments of cultural life events, a space with a depth characteristic. In the Russian corpus of texts, based on the conducted sampling, the following cases of values were recorded: an attribute of behavior, someone's belonging, an obstacle, a device that can be turned off, an indicator of strong arousal. The author states that the theoretical provisions of the cognitive approach allow us to confidently speak about the correlation of the concept under consideration not only with feelings, but also with reason. In the course of the structural and semantic analysis of the presented constructions, a number of meanings of the polysemantic structure of this formation are revealed in the English-speaking and Russian-speaking semantic space.