Frame Organization of the "Animal Diseases" Concept in the English Language”

Abstract

The article examines the peculiarities of the ANIMAL DISEASE concept representation in the English language within frame theory, widely known and recognized both in Ukrainian and foreign cognitology. The purpose of the work is to show how accumulated knowledge and information about animal diseases is structured in frame conceptual models and fixed in the minds of English speakers. The research material is a selection of lexicographic data recorded in English specialized and philological dictionaries and encyclopedic directories. In the course of the analysis, we relied on the methods of continuous sampling of linguistic material, definitional and frame analyses. The study not only presents a number of definitions of the term "frame", but also clarifies its concept, describes the frame approach to the concept study. Due to the analysis of the dictionary definitions of the ANIMAL DISEASE concept, its cognitive signs were singled out: "health disorder", "disruption of the activity of the animal's organism" and an additional semantic feature – "the cause of the disease". Based on the typology of basic frames by S. Zhabotynska, the frame of the ANIMAL DISEASE concept was structured on the basis of subject, possessive and actional frames. The vertices of the frame are AGENT, PATIENT, and INSTRUMENT. Structures of knowledge that are represented through lexical units of English animal diseases terminology are also presented in the form of a cognitive model of another type – the structuring of a classificational frame, which is a set of categories and cognitive features, united and expressed by terms. This fixed structure models a field of specialized knowledge and has a certain hierarchical structure consisting of subframes, slots, and subslots. It was concluded that it is appropriate to use traditional cognitive units (frame, gestalt, scenario, script, etc.) for concept modeling, which have a clearer structure than a concept. Information about the concept of ANIMAL DISEASE in combination with the cognitive features attached to it, forming conceptual schemes and giving rise to combinations of frames, structures the conceptual space of ANIMAL DISEASE reflected in the English language.