SEMANTICS AND METAPHORICAL CONCEPTUALISATION OF FEAR IN THE POLISH, RUSSIAN, AND GERMAN LANGUAGES

The author discusses problems of language semantics representation in the cognitive theory of conceptual metaphors. He expresses criticism concerning the explication model of meanings by G. Lakoff and M. Johnson, because it does not take into account certain important aspects of language functional semantics, and, first of all, the communicative context of language nomination and conceptualization of experience. The model of semantic (conceptual) category proposed by the author is based on propositional (predicate-argument) structures, whereas the figurative models form the level of lexicalisation for separate components of base propositional structures. The integrative model of semantic category, ambivalent to the new-positivist and phenomenological theories of meaning, is applied to describe the category of fear in modem Polish language.