The article examines the interaction of the functional-communicative and cognitive parameters in conceptualisation of broad-meaning lexemes with special reference to the verbalised concept ‘CHALLENGE’. The target concept has been chosen on account of its being currently in great demand, which is evidenced by a considerable number of its lexical manifestations in most representative corpora of English. The aim of the research is to identify the types of content in concept development based on the scope of represented phenomena in the functional styles of fiction and journalism. Depending on the speaker’s (writer’s) communicative purport, the vector in categorisation of reality may change, which leads to a different interpretation of the linguistic means used. Considering the lexicographic data as well as the “big” corpus data we focus on the description of how the target concept is viewed on the lexicographic and discursive levels. The research is carried out within the framework of cognitive corpus linguistics, which enables us to identify types of situations and events (frames) that represent the distributional profile of the target lexeme. The conceptual-linguistic analysis revealed that the functional style of journalism contributes to the lexeme’s specification and terminologisation, while in the functional style of fiction metaphorisation increases.