Psycholinguistic Features of Representation of Emotions by the Concept of «Fear»

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to define the role of the concept of emotions in the
conceptual and linguistic pictures of the world of Ukrainian and English people.
Methods of the research. The following theoretical methods of the research
were used to solve the tasks formulated in the article: a categorical method,
structural and functional methods, the methods of the analysis, systematization,
modeling, generalization.
The results of the research. We think that fear is one of the fundamental
emotions that performs a protective function and is accompanied by certain
changes in the activity of higher nervous system, such as: changes in pulse rate
and respiration, blood pressure indicators, function of stomach. However, it
should be noted that feelings of fear stimulate the ability to respond to adverse
factors of objective reality. Being at the highest point of emotional excitement,
one seeks ways to solve the problem, because fear specifically distorts reality,
imprinting on the nature of its perception and interpretation. In the unfavorable
situation, a person seeks to get rid of the state of helplessness and intimidation
as soon as it is possible to minimize the effect of threatening factor. We can
conclude that ideas about the emotion «fear» are localized in the negative
associative-shaped zone of the linguistic picture of the world.
Organizationally emotion-conceptosphere is a set of hierarchically ordered
paradigm, verbalized using lexical and phraseological means of emotional
concepts, which are «quanta», such as structured knowledge about the
emotional life of the person, which are for each other in a complex of structuralsemantic
and functional relationships. Therefore, for the research of the nature
of the emotional-conceptual sphere, it is extremely important to understand the
essence of the emotional concept, to describe and reflect their components, to
analyze the linguistic means by which they are represented. Such a description
needs to take into account the existing in the socio-cultural life of the community
of psychological, sociological and semiotic factors, which together form a
cultural factor that determines the formation and functioning of concepts as a
cognitive-cultural phenomena.
Conclusions. Consequently, in contemporary English categorically different
aspects of lexical unit of fear are fixed by derivative word-building units, which 

explicate: the state of the person; features of the character of the person;
negative evaluation of the object of the threat; manner of the behavior.
The frame of the emotional concept of fear, which contains data of a
declarative nature, reflects the constant and unchanging features of the situation
of the occurrence of fear: the appearance of threat causes the appearance of
fear, which is presented in the physiological and behavioral reactions of a man.
Summarizing all the information, we consider the emotional concept of fear
as a complex nuclear-peripheral configuration of knowledge about prototypical
and not prototypical concepts, figurative and value attributes of the emergence,
experience and elimination of emotion of fear. This configuration forms the
conceptual basis on which the core of the meaning of the multilevel units of
the given emotional concept in contemporary English is constructed. It is also
participated in the formation of mental spaces that are constructed during the
perception of fragments of English-language texts that describe the situation
of the hero’s experience of the state of fear. If the informative structure of the
emotional concept is «responsible» for the denotative aspect of the meaning of
its nominees, then their connotative aspect captures the concept’s place in the
English conceptual picture of the world. The status of the emotional concept
of fear in it is conditioned by the attitude of the ethnos to the correlative
emotion. The point is that, having a biological basis, fear receives a socialized,
nationally and culturally conditioned form of the expression that is entirely
based on a nationally specific, evaluative attitude of the person to emotions as
a socialized phenomenon. Being the basis of the emotional concept of fear, this
emotion projects the peculiarities of his / her experience on his / her semantic
structure. In such a way the socialization of fear, which is largely normatively
determined, predicts the status of the emotional concept under study as being
essentially axiological, demonstrating the connection of its meaningful elements
with nationally colored social dogmas and the rules that actualize emotions, is
restrained and suppressed.