Language Representation Features of Primary Human Needs in Discourse: a Case Study on Short Prose by A. Solzhenitsyn

Olena Statsenko

doi:10.15388/respectus.2020.39.44.85

Abstract

The article is devoted to the cognitive analysis of linguistic means, representing the primary human needs in extreme conditions. The nominations denoting the concepts of “food” and “warmth” are subjected to the lexico-semantic, grammatical, stylistic consideration. A choice of the discourse for analysis is due to describing a human life in detention when the primary adaptive needs prevail all others and become the most valuable. The representation of human basic biological need in food and warmth is considered in the given contexts. The use of colloquial vocabulary, grammatical norms violation, as well as figurative comparisons and transformed phraseological units in the contexts determine peculiarities of the verbal explication of the concept “food”. The author pays attention to the stylistically reduced vocabulary, which stands out the lexeme “belly”, acquiring new semantic shades in the analyzed fragments. With the nomination of warmth as another important human need for existence, the lexeme “stove” is associated. The paper identifies and analyzes the factors that cause the life values changes at the cognitive level of a person experiencing deprivation of basic biological needs.

Highlights

The fact that a person is a social phenomenon and a biological being with inherent needs and requirements is indisputable
The cognitive analysis of the lexical units representing primary human needs in the textual and contextual aspects of discourse demonstrates that the psychological state of this basic needs deprivation affects the nature and thematic content of the communication
Due to the Slavic mentality, the tokens food and bread are equal in their associative meaning, which is confirmed by the abundance of phraseological units, especially paremias which include the lexeme bread

Summary

Introduction

The fact that a person is a social phenomenon and a biological being with inherent needs and requirements is indisputable. 37).all cognitive abilities of a hungry person are primarily subordinated to the search for food, an individual is not interested in such concepts like love, poetry and philosophy, a person craves for the satisfaction of a basic need for food. In this regard, the aforementioned biological needs become leading, come to the fore, and social ones become less significant: “not a search for truth is needed, but a search for food” Maslow calls the state of extreme hunger a “chronic extreme hunger of the emergency type” (1970, p. 38) and is convinced that a typical person living in conditions of a well-developed society experiences, such hunger rarely enough, once or twice in his life, because the task of every society is to ensure the satisfaction of the most pressing biological needs

Objectives

Conclusion