Вербализация ментальных характеристик человека (на материале английских сложных адъективов)

С. 141–147.

Antonova M.

The article presents some results of the investigation into the conceptual basis of semantics of the English adjectives comprising the lexical category “Mental characteristics of human beings”. A case study of compound adjectives shows that the conceptual basis of their semantics is formed, in particular, by space conceptions that reflect humans’ ontological knowledge and are realized through the conceptual metaphor “container”. This research revealed that this metaphor underlies the semantics of the majority of the compound adjectives in question. The head-word semantics is based on the concept CONTAINER, which is verbalized via eight substantive stems (head-, pat-, brain- etc). The container is believed to possess certain properties, which are verbalized via the second element of the compounds. The quality of humans’ mental activity is associated with the container properties. As the examples demonstrate, the following parameters of the container are projected on the target domain of human beings mental characteristics: size, weight, thickness of the shell, substance physical qualities. Corruption of these is seen as the reason of inability to understand or memorize new information, in particular:  smaller size of the container, excessively thick shell, excessively high/low weight of the substance, wrong substance. The field of negative mental characteristics is nominated more rigorously and meticulously: the number of these compounds is twice that of the compounds with positive mental characteristics.

 

Keywords: концептуальная метафора, conceptual metaphor, compound, базовые и композитные производственные функции, композит, концептуальное основание семантики, conceptual base of semantics

In book

Коммуникация в современном поликультурном мире: национально-культурная специфика построения дискурса

Вып. 4. , М.: Pearson Education Limited (российское представительство), 2016.