Reconstruction of the concept self-reflection on the basis of the English language corpus-informed materials

Abstract

The rationale for the present study is the research interest to one of the most wide-spread concept, self-reflection, which is a verbal and cogitative mechanism of the linguistic consciousness (individual and collective) and, at the same time, it reflects the conception of the worldview of the native English speakers. The concept semantics is explained on the material of the English language corpus. The authors analyze the structure of the verbalized concept in question. The study involved analysis of dictionary definitions and corpus analysis to identify the information content, sensory image component and interpretation field of the concept self-reflection. 443 texts form the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the British National Corpus and famous people’s utterances were subjected to the analysis. The research resulted in revealing cognitive attributes of the concept and the construction of its three-component structural and semantic scheme. The authors found out that the cognitive dimension of the English people consciousness assigns the following cognitive attributes to the concept self-reflection: sensory image: ability to judge, analyze, importance to a person, connection with human consciousness, degree of efforts made, time duration, degree of independence, frequency, effectiveness; careful and critical thinking, restoration of distorted communication, inner dialogue, critical review, rational form of thinking, careful analysis, basis for self-improvement, self-comprehension, systematic character; information content: thinking about yourself; interpretation filed: testing your ideas, self-testing, self-development, obtaining happiness and success, quality of a mature personality, way to freedom, light.

Keywords

• concept
• discourse
• corpus analysis
• structural and semantic scheme
• linguistic consciousness
• self-reflection