Means of Verbalization of the Concept "DISEASE" in English

Abstract

Abstract. In recent decades, the greatest attention in research on cognitive linguistics is paid to the concept and study of the means of its verbalization in different languages. Linguists believe that "among the universal concepts can be attributed the “DISEASE" concept, which reflects the universal and national-specific (social, ethical, moral) ideas about the phenomenon of disease".

The article considers the problem of conceptualization of the "DISEASE" concept in English and the means of its verbalization. The author considers the specifics of lexical units that represent this concept by means of the English language. The relevance of the study lies in the need to specify the data on the verbalization of the "DISEASE" concept by the English language means, as consideration of the specifics of verbalization of this concept has not been given sufficient attention.

The purpose of the article is to analyze the peculiarities of verbalization of the “DISEASE" concept in the English-language picture of the world.

Materials and methods of research. The use of descriptive and comparative methods, etymological and contextual analysis contributed to the selection of semantic and cognitive features of the concept of "DISEASE", substantiation of the peculiarities of its verbalization. The material for the study were dictionary articles from dictionaries, texts of medical discourse, the work of foreign researchers on this issue.

Results of the research. The author identifies the three most common units in the lexical-semantic series of the concept of disease: "disease", "illness", "sickness". A comparative analysis of these tokens within the lexical-semantic field "disease" in English showed that they have a common semantic feature - "health problems, physiological or mental problems." Considering the concept of "DISEASE" on a naive level, we can say that a naive native speaker (not a specialist in medicine) uses language units to express and describe their health, and in his lexicon the terms "illness", "sickness" prevail. In scientific texts and specialized dictionaries, which are focused on medical professionals, the dominant number of diseases is expressed by the unit "disease".

Сonclusions. Thus, despite the fact that all three considered tokens "disease", "illness" and "sickness" have a clear semantic similarity to the concept of "disease" in the context of the cognitive feature of "state of illness, physiological or mental distress", their peculiarity in the English medical discourse is obvious and is determined by the nominative smallness in the linguistic picture of the world. Summarizing all the above, the lexical-semantic field of the "disease" concept in English medical discourse can be considered as follows: the token "sickness" is a social construct of disease that passes through the medical system (token "disease") and shows the suffering of the patient illness”), which is associated with social norms and cultural values.