THE SEMANTIC CONSTITUENT OF ENGLISH CONCEPTUAL STRUCTURES NETWORK

Abstract

The theme of the article is in extricably linked with the main task of cognitive approach to the study of the English language system–to explain the process of learning, processing and transmitting of information with the help of verbal means that, infact, determine the nature of the human mind.The article is devoted to thestudy of semantic aspects of identifi cation of such English-language conceptual structures as morphological metaconcepts and lexical concepts and also the issues of semantic transformations in the network of their structure. Morphological metaconceptis understoodas a unit of metacognition, a constituent of the metacognitive level of the lingvo-mental setting. Also the research deals with the lingvo-cognitive study of the role of English morphological metaconcepts in the processes of conceptual derivation, which determines creation of derivatives, that verbalise as parts of affi xal innovations.Under the author’s theory submitted in the article, the structure of morphological metaconcepts differs from the structure of lexical concepts not in the number of clusters, but in the degree of their fullness in information components. Filling of clusters of the “zone of initialabsence” with the information components occurs when the processes of lexicalization begin. The paperrevealstheideathatsemanticvariationofthelingual unit, arisingfromsemanticderivation, shows the law of “economy of mental effort.”The principle of this law is based on “packing” of newinformationintoalreadyexistingmentalstructures (concepts). Englishlexicalinnovationsarepresentedin theroleofi llustrativematerialoftheoreticaldefi nitionsofthiswork.