LEXICAL-SEMANTIC FEATURES OF ACTIVATION OF ENGLISH HANDBALL DISCOURSE CONCEPTS (ON THE MATERIAL OF SCIENTIFIC AND POPULAR TEXTS)

Abstract

Purpose. In the context of broad international contacts, with Ukraine becoming an independent active participant of the Olympic movement, there is a perpetual development of sports discourse, in particular handball one. A linguist’s aim is to study the features and consequences of this phenomenon objectively as well as to develop criteria and norms for the functioning of oral and written pieces of speech in this field. The research of scientific and popular texts of English handball discourse is a peculiar segment of scientific investigation that requires in-depth knowledge of the field. The specific nature of such a research involves not only mastering the basic knowledge of scientific and popular texts functioning peculiarities, but also comprehending the handball discourse situation, its functional orientation. Hence, an urgent need arises to analyze the English handball discourse concepts as the main mental organizational units acting for storing knowledge about the handball world, as well as lexical and semantic features of their actualization on the material of scientific and popular texts, being the purpose of the research.

To achieve the purpose, one must solve problems such as framing the term “concept” with further defining the term “conceptual system” to differentiate the English handball discourse conceptual system and its integral structural elements, and to outline ways of reflecting the English handball discourse concepts from the lexical and semantic point of view.

Method. It was functional method as well as contextual one used during the research.

Results. The conducted research makes it possible to obtain the results indicating that the main lexical and semantic features of the concepts activation are terms and creolization. Terms appear to be a linguistic marker occurring in the text and embodying a certain concept or concepts of the discourse. Since language is considered to be the main tool for the material concepts representation, the whole set of English scientific and popular texts in the handball field, where handball terminological units are found, is a universe of English handball discourse concepts. By virtue of certain concepts embedded in the lexical and semantic core of terms, handball terminology forms an image of the handball vocabulary peculiarity.

Conclusions. Therefore, one can reach the conclusions that the use of creolization as a means of terms arranging in scientific and popular texts, and, consequently, activation of relevant concepts, contributes to the revealing of the concept handball, the hyperonym within the concept system, which is a cornerstone in the concept system formation, multiply presenting a lush verbal constituent in non-verbal robes, with a successful combination of linguistic and paralinguistic components laying the foundation for accomplishing the communicative goal of scientific and popular texts.