SPEECH REALIZATION OF THE ENGLISH CONCEPT ALCHEMY

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of the peculiarities of verbalization of the concept ALCHEMY and the definition of its conceptual features, which is one of the relevant tasks of modern cognitive semantics. The aim of the work is to analyze the lexical means of speech verbalization of the concept ALCHEMY concept. The material of the analysis was explanatory, etymological dictionaries of the English language and scientific and publicist texts on the Internet, which are devoted to the description of the phenomenon of alchemy. The following research methods were used in the work: etymological analysis, definition analysis, conceptual analysis, contextual-interpretative method. The article defines the term "concept" as an operational meaningful unit of memory, mental lexicon, conceptual system and brain language (lingua mentalis), the whole picture of the world reflected in the human psyche, provides basic approaches to its study and structure. The structure of the concept reflects the initial perception of the people of the phenomenon, its understanding at the conceptual level, as well as other ideas about it that arise as a result of continuous human interaction with the outside world. The study of the speech embodiment of any concept should be carried out in several stages: 1) analysis of the etymology of the lexical unit that nominates the corresponding concept, and the selection of motivational conceptual features; 2) identification of notional conceptual features through the analysis of relevant vocabulary definitions and speech contexts; 3) construction of the structure of the studied concept. The definition and contextual-interpretative analysis showed that the conceptual features of the concept ALCHEMY are unscientific, search, transformation, eternal life, universal medicine, mysticism, secrecy, purity of thought, durability. The motivational features of the ALCHEMY concept are determined by the etymology of the English lexical unit alchemy and are verbalized as follows: occultism, search, unscientific. These conceptual features are nuclear features in the structure of the corresponding concept. A promising continuation of this study is the analysis of lexical means of verbalization of the concept ALCHEMY in English creative writing, as well as the study of linguistic features of the image of an alchemist, which will highlight the periphery of the analyzed concept.