The Frame of Love Affair and Its Representation in the Lexico-Semantic System of the Russian Language

Abstract

The article analyses the means of linguistic explication of the frame love affair in the Russian language. The data came from Russian etymological, explanatory, and derivational dictionaries. The concept was described through the paradigmatic, syntagmatic, and derivational peculiarities of the words that represent the concept. The concept was reconstructed as a frame with the following slots: aim, action, agent, counter-agent, patient, evaluation, and result. The aim of the research was to show how the words that name the act of love affair represent this cognitive frame model. The act of love affair proved to reject previous beliefs and feelings while replacing the former with the other. The agent violates fidelity in love, which is evaluated as violating the moral law. The frame is verbalized as the following slots: 1) the agent (traitor, cheater, adulterer/adulteress) is an insidious person who is in a legal relationship with the patient; 2) the act (to cheat on somebody, to commit adultery) is committed in secret and includes marital unfaithfulness and a change of partner; 3) the evaluation of the act and the agent (treacherous, unfaithful, adulterous) is negative. Several slots had no verbal expression but could be explicated from idioms and examples: 1) the patient is the spouse of the agent; 2) the counter-agent is the person the agent enters into an illegal relationship; 3) the result depends on the particular situation.