Psycholinguistic Features of Representation of Emotions by the Concept of «Fear»

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to define the role of the concept of emotions in theconceptual and linguistic pictures of the world of Ukrainian and English people.Methods of the research. The following theoretical methods of the researchwere used to solve the tasks formulated in the article: a categorical method,structural and functional methods, the methods of the analysis, systematization,modeling, generalization.The results of the research. We think that fear is one of the fundamentalemotions that performs a protective function and is accompanied by certainchanges in the activity of higher nervous system, such as: changes in pulse rateand respiration, blood pressure indicators, function of stomach. However, itshould be noted that feelings of fear stimulate the ability to respond to adversefactors of objective reality. Being at the highest point of emotional excitement,one seeks ways to solve the problem, because fear specifically distorts reality,imprinting on the nature of its perception and interpretation. In the unfavorablesituation, a person seeks to get rid of the state of helplessness and intimidationas soon as it is possible to minimize the effect of threatening factor. We canconclude that ideas about the emotion «fear» are localized in the negativeassociative-shaped zone of the linguistic picture of the world.Organizationally emotion-conceptosphere is a set of hierarchically orderedparadigm, verbalized using lexical and phraseological means of emotionalconcepts, which are «quanta», such as structured knowledge about theemotional life of the person, which are for each other in a complex of structuralsemanticand functional relationships. Therefore, for the research of the natureof the emotional-conceptual sphere, it is extremely important to understand theessence of the emotional concept, to describe and reflect their components, toanalyze the linguistic means by which they are represented. Such a descriptionneeds to take into account the existing in the socio-cultural life of the communityof psychological, sociological and semiotic factors, which together form acultural factor that determines the formation and functioning of concepts as acognitive-cultural phenomena.Conclusions. Consequently, in contemporary English categorically differentaspects of lexical unit of fear are fixed by derivative word-building units, which explicate: the state of the person; features of the character of the person;negative evaluation of the object of the threat; manner of the behavior.The frame of the emotional concept of fear, which contains data of adeclarative nature, reflects the constant and unchanging features of the situationof the occurrence of fear: the appearance of threat causes the appearance offear, which is presented in the physiological and behavioral reactions of a man.Summarizing all the information, we consider the emotional concept of fearas a complex nuclear-peripheral configuration of knowledge about prototypicaland not prototypical concepts, figurative and value attributes of the emergence,experience and elimination of emotion of fear. This configuration forms theconceptual basis on which the core of the meaning of the multilevel units ofthe given emotional concept in contemporary English is constructed. It is alsoparticipated in the formation of mental spaces that are constructed during theperception of fragments of English-language texts that describe the situationof the hero’s experience of the state of fear. If the informative structure of theemotional concept is «responsible» for the denotative aspect of the meaning ofits nominees, then their connotative aspect captures the concept’s place in theEnglish conceptual picture of the world. The status of the emotional conceptof fear in it is conditioned by the attitude of the ethnos to the correlativeemotion. The point is that, having a biological basis, fear receives a socialized,nationally and culturally conditioned form of the expression that is entirelybased on a nationally specific, evaluative attitude of the person to emotions asa socialized phenomenon. Being the basis of the emotional concept of fear, thisemotion projects the peculiarities of his / her experience on his / her semanticstructure. In such a way the socialization of fear, which is largely normativelydetermined, predicts the status of the emotional concept under study as beingessentially axiological, demonstrating the connection of its meaningful elementswith nationally colored social dogmas and the rules that actualize emotions, isrestrained and suppressed.