FRAME MODEL OF THE CONCEPT HARMONY

Abstract

The article looks into the analysis of the concept HARMONY in the English discourse from the linguosynergetic perspective, according to which a concept is regarded as an open self-developing system. As far as a concept is considered to be a basic component of interpreting the world around, there exists a necessity of determining the mutual impact of language units and cognitive processes. The main focus of the research is on reconstructing the frame model of the concept HARMONY in line with the belonging of its verbalised forms to basic frames, in accordance with the theory of semantic fields. This aim was achieved by analysing the nominative units of the concept, i.e. dictionary definitions of the lexeme “harmony”, collocations extracted from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), as well as idioms and paremias representing this concept. The use of COCA materials was determined by the vast amount of contexts, provided by this Corpus, which provided the ground for classifying the extracted units. At the same time the definitions extracted from 12 monolingual dictionaries gave the opportunity to look into the interconnections between the nominative units belonging to different schemas within the basic frames. Therefore, the above-mentioned nominative units were categorised and affiliated to basic frames, allowing to visualise the systematic and dynamic nature of this concept. The frame model of concept HARMONY built as a result of the present research, contributes to the study of the dynamic character of this concept and its fractal nature, i.e. its openness to change and development while preserving its most essential features in each element of the whole system.