Development of the lexical concept of “intelligence” in the English language: modern trend analysis based on the methods of lexicography and corpus linguistics

This study deals with lexical content of the concept “intelligence” in the Anglophone worldview based on the contemporary on-line dictionaries and corpora of the English language. Theoretical approaches to studying the notion of “concept” and conceptual structures are analyzed. The key representatives of the concept are discovered with the help of lexicographical and corpus methods. The search for nominative units topically related to the concept of “intelligence” resulted in 272 lexical units. A significant number of ideographical, stylistic and conceptual synonyms discovered by means of lexicographical and corpus methods, as well as the frequency of their usage, are the evidence of a particular communicative significance of this concept for the Anglophone linguoculture. The analysis of the most frequently used word combinations of the nuclear nominal and adjectival representants of the concept suggests modern transformation of the concept “intelligence”. The extension of the concept of intellectual capabilities is directly linked with the development of psychology and emergence of new theories of intelligence. In addition to the traditional lexical layer associated with human mental capabilities, another layer of vocabulary is formed that is related to the functional features of modern technologies and technical system theories. This stems from the increasing widespread usage of so-called smart devices, specifically, mobile phones, as well as from the emergence of new scientific areas that study the capacity of intellectual systems to perform cognitive functions instead of human being. The practical relevance of the study lies in the applicability of the findings for the purposes of teaching English to linguistics undergraduates, as well as for courses in cultural and cognitive linguistics and cross-cultural communication.

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