On lexical meaning of the word misfortune (conceptualization of misfortune as a physical object)

The abstract noun misfortune is interpreted differentlyby every Russian speaker who is interested in its meaning (its understanding and its defining). What information about the wordis there in the mind of Russian informants? The principal problem is that all the interpretations do not contain the relevant attributes ofthe meaning therefore it is impossible to form a differentiated conception about the fact nominated by this word. Probably, there is aconception of misfortune above its definition; maybe, it is a conceptual word meaning. By reason of this lexicographical problem weare interested in extracting of the maximal quantity of semantic elements of the word meaning by the analysis of the contexts from theRussian National Corpus. We preferred the syntagmatic analysis; it is an analysis of word combinations and predicative constructionswhich is accentuated on the combinatory characteristics of the researched word. The researched word is an abstract noun; therefore, theprimary variant of our analysis is the analysis of the objects connotations represented on the basis of the found connections of the wordmisfortune with other words. The method of objects connotations representation is the method of discovery of figurative semanticelements in the word meaning. As a result of the analysis, we can see a figurative-ontological portrait of the word misfortune veryclearly. Misfortune is someone big or something hard who / that attacks human body or soul. The most important for the person are theconsequences of his/her misfortune and, in the first place, how it attacks persons body. The person senses misfortune using all theorgans of sense except hearing but organs of sight are used more often than others. Misfortune (someone or something) is often connectedwith a certain local fixed situation and with the irreversibility of the event that happened. The attention is accentuated on theseoutside situations if the person marked the result of the event that happened (or imagined this result in future when the action is realizedin present) as its destructive consequences. Dominance is a characteristic for misfortune because it is assimilated to object, to substanceor to being someone excelling people in different characteristics or in strength. In the majority of the contexts misfortunecrushes the person. As a result, we can represent the most relevant attribute of the word meaning. It is caused by a certain irreversibledestruction (destructive action / operation of someone / something). Thereafter, we can say the fact that is nominated by the abstractnoun misfortune is a negative situation. As a rule, it is a physical situation (human body participates in the outside world), but itmay cause emotions in the person.

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