EVOLUTION OF HYPERCONCEPTS LOVE AND MAN VEBALISATION IN ADELE’S LYRICS

Abstract

This article is devoted to the analysis of the evolution of linguistic verbalisation of the hyperconcepts LOVE and MAN in Adele’s songwriting. The relevance of the study is determined by the shortage of existing analyses aimed at studying the evolution of the concept in the individual conceptual system of discourse. Although English-language song discourse is one of the leading objects of linguistic research and one of the most influential phenomena in English-speaking culture, it remains unevenly investigated. Notwithstanding the fact that research into emotional and gender concepts in artistic language is becoming increasingly prevalent, the examination of concepts in the linguistic worldviews of individual authors, namely Adele, has not yet been the subject of comprehensive cognitive-linguistic research. Furthermore, Adele’s texts are valuable material for analysing the dynamics of concepts in English-language song discourse. The work provides an overview of the development and application of linguistic verbalisation tools for the realisation of key concepts in three main periods of Adele’s work. The methodological basis for the study was the semiotic realisation of concepts developed by Anatoliy Prykhodko and the theory of conceptual metaphor by Mark Johnson and George Lakoff. The result revealed the changes in the concepts under study and how this is reflected in the means of linguistic verbalisation. Thus, the concept of love evolves from an unrequited, idealised and largely linguistically objectified concept in the early period of her work to a holistic, personalised feeling of love for oneself, one’s fellow human beings and maternal love in the later period. Concurrently, the concept of a man evolves from a “lexically idealised” object of love to a metaphorically deformed, syntactically fragmented, and emotionally split figure of a father and an echo of the past. The results obtained can be utilised for further cognitive-discursive research, namely for an expanded study of other concepts and the construction of a conceptual system of English-language song discourse. There is also scope for a comparison of the linguistic worldviews of several artists and the identification of unified characteristics and trends in English-language song discourse.