Kateryna Tymchuk (Тимчук Катерина)
Kamianets-Podilsky Ivan Ohienko National University
Scientific supervisor: Matkovska M.V.,
Аssociate professor
THE CONCEPT OF LIFE: PROTOTYPICAL WORD SENSES AND REFERENTS ON THE MATERIAL OF J. LONDON’S STORIES
In recent years, researchers have become increasingly interested in the study of concept. The article focuses on the notion of the concept in cognitive linguistics. The paper presents a detailed analysis of the concept “life” on the material of Jack London’s stories. The conclusion is drawn to the effect that conceptual analysis is aimed at revealing the content of concepts and differentiation of their meanings. In general this investigation shows that the concept “life” is expressed through various types of conceptual metaphors.
Key words: cognition, concept, the concept LIFE, conceptualization, meaning, category, word senses, conceptual metaphors.
Language helps us categorize our experiences of the world. Therefore, a word expresses the whole world, or at least all the experiences we have of our world that have somehow been categorized linguistically. We do not have to expect that for each conceptual category we have just one linguistic category, or word. It is not right to think that each word stands for one conceptual category, or one meaning. On average, a word form has three to four senses. A word with different, related senses is a polysemous word.
The notion of concept may be understood as a person’s idea of what something in the world is like. More specifically, concepts can relate to single entities: the concept of life can relate to struggle, hope, development and so on. Such concepts which slice the reality into relevant units are called categories. Conceptual categories are concepts of a set as a whole. Whenever we perceive something, we automatically tend to categorize it.
All the categories have prototypical or central members and more marginal or peripheral members. The principle does not only apply to the members of a category, but also to the various senses of a word form. There are three interrelated ways that help us determine which sense of a word is the most central. In order to establish the salience of a sense, we can look at what particular sense comes to mind first, we can find out which use is the most frequent or estimate which sense is more basic in its capacity to clarify the other senses [8, p. 30–33].
Let us clear up the category of the concept LIFE. The analysis of data shows that such an abstract and elusive concept as LIFE is expressed by various types of conceptual metaphors, but is characterized mainly via metaphorical mappings of the source domain such as JOURNEY. More specifically, the analysis of examples revealed that in the process of conceptualization of ‘life’ through the prism of ‘journey’ in the conceptual metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY, three dominant imageries such as ‘path’ (moving forward), ‘process’, and ‘moving object’ or ‘stationary observer’ can be distinguished with relation to: a) a two-dimensional space in conceptual metaphor LIFE IS A PATH WE [AS TRAVELLERS] MOVE THROUGH; b) a process in a “progressive” conceptual metaphor LIFE IS A PROCESS, which has certain discrete stages like starting and finishing points as well as separate phases and reached stages; c) an object in a “dynamic” conceptual metaphor with an active object in LIFE IS A MOVING OBJECT and a passive observer in LIFE IS A STATIONARY OBSERVER.
In the conceptual metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY, life of a person is associated with the travelling along the allotted lifetime. In the process of metaphorical representation, the LIFE concept is structured in the concrete domain of journey, using spatial and dynamic terms, peculiar to the JOURNEY scheme. This means that the structures mapped form the source domain of “journey” to the target domain of “life” should be that of the “path” scheme which is at the heart of the “journey” domain.
- a) LIFE IS A PATH WE [AS TRAVELLERS] MOVE THROUGH:
“He had been perturbed always by a feeling of unrest, had heard always the call of something from beyond, and had wandered on through life seeking it until he found books and art and love” [6, p. 312].
The example shows us that people, just like the travelers, often wander around in search of their ‘right route’, defined as a rule by the things that should take priorities in their course of life, and, before they have actually found it and are ready to start ‘their real’ journey they might already feel tired during the process.
- b) LIFE IS A PROCESS:
“His life was fading, fainting, gasping away in the tent in the snow”
[4, p. 115].
The ‘motion’ scheme in the conceptual metaphor LIFE IS A PROCESS is used to indicate an unceasing process of life in its ‘fictive rotary’ motion. On the whole, the given view on life is rather of philosophical nature. However, most of examples, characterizing the process of life, clearly depict discrete points of the beginning and ending of life. Being restless about the uncertainty of life path shows negative feelings of the person experiencing it. As regards the final stage of life, when the whole picture of life is put together, people may experience dubious feelings, for example ‘peace’ and ‘disappointment’.
- c) LIFE IS A MOVING OBJECT:
It means that life represents itself through sensorimotor actions that people experience, e.g. ‘life would pass away, and be gone’, ‘life passed’. Such metaphors are ubiquitous in everyday language.
- d) LIFE IS A STATIONARY OBSERVER:
“He was seeking a new orientation, and until that was found his life must stand still” [6, p. 318].
“He was waiting for some impulse, from he knew not where, to put his stopped life into motion again” [6, p. 325].
“The tendency of the individual life is to be static rather than dynamic, and this tendency is made into a propulsion by civilization, where the obvious only is seen, and the unexpected rarely happens” [5, p. 125].
These examples present life as ‘an object that is stationary with respect to another, moving one’.
Taking everything into consideration, if you were to count the types of senses where a word life is used in every-day language, you would probably discover that the ‘existence’ sense is used far more frequently than the other senses. As a result the sense ‘existence’ is much more central or salient in our conception of life.
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