CONCEPTUAL DOMAIN ‘PERSONALITY TRAITS’: STRUCTURE AND LANGUAGE MEANS OF REPRESENTATION

Abstract

The paper deals with conceptual and language representation of the character of a person and aims to explore the content and structure of the conceptual domain PERSONALITY TRAITS through describing the system of categories and subcategories that constitute the domain and to identify the units that represent the categories in the English language and discourse. The research methods used include conceptual analysis, dictionary and thesaurus analysis, discourse analysis, comparative analysis and the analytico-descriptive method. The article defines the scope of the conceptual domain and shows that it contains a large number of categories and subcategories that can be grouped into 22 thematic classes representing various aspects of a person’s character and attitude to other people and entities. The categories are expressed in discourse by numerous lexemes (nouns and adjectives) and phrases. It is shown that some of the categories, most notably those pertaining to a person’s attitude to norms of civilized behaviour, have a much greater number of means of expression than others. The findings contribute to the studies of the English language worldview and comparative analysis of different language worldviews. The findings can also be used in the cognitive studies of lexemes, synonyms and translation.