Theterm «Concept»

"In recent years in the humanitarian field of scientific knowledge more and more attention has been paid to the relationship of language and culture, language and national mentality, language and national consciousness. In this connection, the object of study, the approaches and methods of describing and studying language are being reinterpreted. Researches pay more and more attention to such a category as a concept. Despite a widespread use of this concept in the field of scientific research, the term «concept» itself has not yet received an unambiguous interpretation. And this is due to the fact that researchers representing various branches of scientific knowledge, single out and consider decisive various features of this object. At present it should be recognized that it is a concept that is the key of cognitive linguistics. However, despite the fact that a concept can be considered established for modern cognitive science, the content of this concept varies significantly in the conceptions of various scientific schools and individual scientists. The fact is that a concept is a category of thinking that is not observable, and this gives a lot of room for its interpretation. Today the category of a concept appears in the studies of philosophers, logicians, psychologists, and cultural scientists, and it bears the traces of all these extra-linguistic interpretations. This term, although firmly established in modern linguistics, does not still have a single definition, although many well-known scholars are fruitfully studying a concept: N. D. Arutyunova, A. P. Babushkin, A. Vezhbitskaya, E. S. Kubryakova, S. E. Nikitina, V. N. Telia, R. M. Frumkin and others. Thus, it can be stated that the term of a concept in linguistics is both old and new at the same time. Back in 1928 famous scientist S. A. Askoldov published the article «Concept and Word», but until the middle of the last century, a concept was not perceived as a term in scientific literature. A concept is a cultural phenomenon of storing, developing and accumulating information, perhaps its universal definition is the shortest logical characteristic: a concept is a constructive concept of storing and accumulating information in the linguistic picture of the world. Thus, concepts represent the world in the head of a person, forming a conceptual system, and the signs of the human language encode the content of this system in a word. "