MENTAL SPACE AS A WAY OF PRESENTING AND STRUCTURING HUMAN KNOWLEDGE

Abstract

The author raises one of the important issues of cognitive linguistics, namely the representation and structuring of knowledge that a person receives during their life and discursive activity. This research is based on the «theory of mental spaces» (G. Fauconnier and M. Turner), according to which language appears not only as an object of human interpretation, but also as a constructive principle: it creates mental spaces and determines the relationship between them. Mental spaces reflect reality, ways of thinking and speech of speakers. The main purpose is to model the mental space of the French adjective vert, its usual and new images, which allow demonstrating the way of obtaining, processing and storing human knowledge. The choice of idioms as research material is explained by the fact that these units vividly reflect the mentality of the representatives of the language community, the peculiarities of their vision and understanding of reality, and also demonstrate the cognitive mechanisms during the generation of new nominative units. After analyzing the material, the author suggests that during the world perception and communication, mental spaces can build up structured information. They are divided into three spheres, each of which has its own images: sacred, profane and metaphorical. The study of new idioms showed that only 75% of them fit into the traditional model of the metaphorical sphere. The mental space of other units contains new images of the adjective vert, which complement different spheres and can further serve as the basis for the formation of new idioms.