Complementing and eliminating images as cognitive ways of generating new conceptual meaning in secondary phraseologization

The article discusses the structural and semantic modifications of conventional phraseological units, in which a change in the formal structure of original phraseological units entails the generation of a new semantic meaning, and then a new phraseological unit. In light of the emergence of new scientific concepts, especially in the domain of cognitive linguistics, they attract more and more attention of linguists, since they reflect the peculiarities of the complex activity of the human brain in obtaining, processing, and using of verbalized knowledge. The aim of the article is a detailed description from a cognitive point of view of the processes of complementing and eliminating images during secondary phraseologization by modeling the mental spaces of the components of the original phraseological unit and the integrated space of the generated phraseological unit, in which a new conceptual meaning develops. The research material is the neological phraseological units of the journalistic discourse of the modern French language formed as a result of these processes, which have appeared for the last 10 years. This research is based on the cognitive concepts of meaning generation, namely, on the theory of mental spaces and conceptual integration developed by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner. Reasoning from the structure of mental spaces (sacred, profane and metaphorical spheres), as well as their ability to integrate, the author models the mechanism of generating a new conceptual meaning during the formation of a neological phraseological unit. The analysis of the complementing shows that the initial conceptual meaning can be replenished with new images (image of the performed action or state, image of the attribute of the nomination object, the image of a new scenario, the image of the performer of the action, the image of the attribute of the action, the image of the scene), as a result of which the original phraseological unit acquires a new conceptual meaning. Elimination of images, in which the structural organization of the original phraseological unit is reduced, supposes two ways of developing a new conceptual meaning: categorical transformation of the original phraseological unit and development of conceptual meaning in the direction from a specific to a generalized meaning. In the course of the study, the author comes to the conclusion that the cognitive basis for generating a new conceptual meaning is the rethinking of the images available in the original mental spaces, which reflects the basic procedures of a person’s thinking during secondary phraseologization, as well as their life and speech experience. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

Keywords

Authors

References