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102"CONCEPT" DEFINITION: DIFFERENT APPROACHES TO THE QUESTION
Shingareva M.
Candidate of Philology, Associate Professor of the Department of English language, South Kazakhstan
State Pedagogical University, Shymkent, Kazakhstan
Zakirhadzhaeva A.
Master students of Philological faculty, South Kazakhstan State Pedagogical University, Shymkent,
Kazakhstan
Abstract
The concept is the main category of cognitive linguistics. There are a huge number of approaches to the consideration of this category and interpretations of this term. The article is devoted to a brief review of various approaches to the concept of the concept in the works of leading linguists. In conclusion, the author notes that the prototypical nature of the concept determines the presence of national specificity in its structure.
Keywords: concept, image, prototype, conceptosphere
In the implementation of one of the main tasks of linguoculturology - the study of man in language, the construction of his image in everyday communicative practices, man is considered and studied not in the field of "transcendental heights of abstraction", but as " functioning in the real conditions of culture and language "[1, p. 42]. This kind of research is based on the postulate that language is "the only means that can help us to penetrate into the hidden sphere of mentality, because it determines the way the world thinks in a particular culture and tells about a person such things that the person himself does not know" [2, p. 114]
The key concept of linguistics, correlated with a certain set of mental representations of a person about objects and phenomena of the surrounding world expressed in language, as well as with a set of representations about the person himself, is the term "concept".
The existing approaches to the definition of the concept are reduced to linguocognitive and linguocul-tural.
Within the framework of linguocognitive approach the concept is defined as "a unit of mental or psychic resources of our consciousness and the informational structure that reflects knowledge and human experience; and operational meaningful unit of memory, mental lexicon, conceptual system and language of the world, the whole world reflected in the human psyche" [3, p. 90]. Concepts are represented in the psyche by special mental forms-images, pictures, schemes, etc. [3, p.91].
Concepts within the framework of this approach are defined as models of consciousness (C-models) -certain thought structures existing in the consciousness of the person, whose components are representations and concepts about objects and phenomena of the surrounding world, the relations between them, encoded in some cases by verbal or other signs [4, p. 23].
Linguocultural approach to understanding the concept considers the concept as "a clot of culture in the consciousness of man" [5, p. 40]. Cultural concepts, according to D. S. Likhachev, exist not by themselves, but in a certain "idiosphere", the formation of which is conditioned by cultural experience:"...the richer the concept, the richer the national, class, class, professional, family and personal experience of the person using the concept" [6, p. 282]. The ordered set of concepts
of the nation, the sphere of knowledge, the sphere of thought forms the conceptosphere of the people [6, p. 283].
The essential difference between these two approaches, as E. S. Kubryakova points out, is that for the culturologist the concept is a "constant of culture" (Yu. S. Stepanov), reflects the exceptional importance for this culture and is associated with the ideas, knowledge, associations that are caused by the word designating the concept. The number of cultural concepts, as a rule, is not numerous. At the same time, for a linguist, the concept is a clearly delimited formation of consciousness associated with the mental lexicon [3, p. 13]. The latter, in turn, is defined as " a kind of device of consciousness, fixing the experience of a person, already deposited in the creation of ideas or concepts about him; it is a reservoir of knowledge, where a separate concept or a certain way a United group of concepts have already received linguistic registration in the form of a conventional unit "[3, p. 95].
On the other hand, recently in the works of a number of linguists [arguments in favor of integrating these approaches are put forward. The integration of these approaches contributes, from the Point of view of V. P. Neroznak, to the creation of an interdisciplinary conceptual and cultural direction [7, p. 8].
Within the integral approach recognizes that cognitive and linguocultural approaches are not mutually exclusive, since the concept as a mental formation in the mind of the individual have access to the conceptual sphere of society, i.e. ultimately on the culture, and the concept as a unit of culture is the fixation of cognitive experience, which becomes the property of the individual [8, p.139].
The integral approach to the concept of the concept proceeds from the understanding of the problem of the correlation of language and culture as a variant and invariant, which "means the translation of the discussion into the field of cognitive semantics, when language categories and subsystems (along with other cultural forms) are treated as one of the possible manifestations of some deep cultural invariants" [9, p. 18].
The concept in the framework of the integral approach is defined as a unit of the cultural core related to the collective unconscious - the combination of ideas, which, according to C. G. Jung, are a reflection of the
constantly repeating experience of mankind and the possibility of representation of which is innate . It is the cultural core, according to N. V. Ufimtseva, that determines the limit of permissible changes for a given culture, and it is the presence of this core that ensures the consistency of behavior of all members of a given ethnic group [10, p.118]. The concept as an element of the cultural core of the collective unconscious has the property of continuity and homogeneity within a certain culture.
The integral approach to the definition of the concept, adopted in this paper, involves considering it both from the point of view of cognitive linguistics and lin-guoculturology. As G. G. Slyshkin notes in this connection: "the Fundamental difference of the concept is that it, serving as the basis for the synthesis study of language and culture, does not lie directly in either the language or the cultural spheres, nor in them at the same time. The concept is a mental unit, an element of consciousness. It is human consciousness that mediates between culture and language... The concept is a unit designed to link together scientific research in the field of culture, consciousness and language, because it belongs to consciousness, is determined by culture and is defined in language "[11, p. 10]. The integral approach considers the concept as a multidimensional mental formation in which conceptual, figurative and value components are distinguished [12, p.76].
The methodological basis of the integral," interdisciplinary "understanding of the concept is the theory of L. Weisgerber, in which language is understood as an "intermediate world", "inter-light", lying simultaneously in the field of consciousness and in the field of reality, culture.
The theoretical basis of modern linguistic theories aimed at the formalization of knowledge into certain cognitive structures, one of which is the concept, was also formed on the basis of the scientific direction, called generative semantics. The ideas and provisions of generative semantics are reflected in the various case grammars proposed by C. Fillmore, W. Cheif and others. The cognitive grammar of J. Lakoff, H. Thompson, R. Langakker, J. Gestalt theory. Lakoff contributed to the development of cognitive representation of knowledge, thus preparing the foundation for modern conceptualization theory.
When considering the concept within the integral approach from linguistic and cognitive point of view, should proceed from the fact that in accordance with the General principle of cognition from the concrete, tangible to generalized thinking, the formation of the concept, as noted in several papers [E. S. Kubryakova 2001, A.A. Zalevskaya 2001, I. A. Sternin 2000, A. Solomonik 1995], occurs from figurative, sensual to more abstract. "The concept is born as an image, but, having appeared in consciousness of the person, this image is capable to advance on a step of abstraction. With the increase in the number of features fixed by the concept, with the increase in the level of abstraction, the concept gradually turns from a sensual image into a proper mental one. At the same time, the well-known fact that any abstraction must be explained by example testifies to the figurative nature of any concept" [13, p.
70]. The image, therefore, is the core of the concept, its base layer. The figurative nature of the concept is based on the property of abstractness of thinking, which consists in the ability to use those representations that are not directly based on experience.
According to A. N. Leontiev's definition, an image is "a reflection in the human psyche of the objective world, mediated by objective values and corresponding cognitive schemes and amenable to conscious reflection" [14, p. 268].
In addition, it is the figurative component of concepts that is a parameter of their cultural specificity, since images, as noted by E. F. Tarasov, are culturally specific, and it is the difference of images recorded in the minds of representatives of different cultures that is the main cause of misunderstanding in intercultural communication, while the dialogue of cultures is not so much communication of different consciousnesses, as communication of images of different cultures within one consciousness [15, p. 8-9].
The image, as noted in the works of Linto de Lima [1995], P. M. Frumkina [1992], correlates with the concept of a prototype. As V. Z. Demyankov points out in the "Concise dictionary of cognitive terms": "people form a concrete or abstract mental image of objects belonging to a certain category; this image is called a prototype, if with its help a person perceives reality: a member of the category, which is closer to this sample, will be evaluated as the best example of its class or more prototypical instance than all the others" [16, p. 144]. A similar understanding of the prototype was developed by E. Roche and her followers.
J. Lakoff (1988), applying the theory of prototypes to the study of language and understanding processes, came to the following conclusion: since each culture has its own specific spheres of experience, representatives of different cultures classify the same realities in their own way, i.e. certain classifiers are included in the action, different in different cultures.
These provisions are also related to the concept of the conceptosphere and the indication of the presence of national characteristics in it.
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