LEXEME LONDON AS A KEY REALISATION OF THE LONDON TEXT OF THE ENGLISH LINGUO-CULTURE

Abstract

The article analyses the lexeme London, especially the syntagmatic sequences with it which are regarded as key realisations of the London supertext that the name of the capital generated in the English language and literature. Supertext is viewed as a language unit - an emic text, which is the semantic invariant for a group of texts that have a similar topic. At the level of mental representations, any ethno-specific cultural concept, for instance, corresponds to its supertext which may be either real (verbalised) or potential. In accordance with this conception, the London text is constituted by a set of semantic components and contains mental algorithms for their predication. Being deployed from its text paradigm (sort of mental matrix), it may be translated (that is verbalised) by means of semantically related syntactic sequences. The article establishes the etymology of the lexeme London and considers its derivatives. The necessity of analysing the etymology of the word lies in the fact that the London supertext incorporates both contemporary or relatively stable meaning and the initial diachronic meaning to be looked for in the lexeme that names it. The latter constitutes the “memory” of the supertext, which is present in it in posse as a set of virtualised semantic components. Further examined are a corpus of set phrases and phraseological units containing the lexeme in question. A study of the derivatives of the lexeme London (ten in number) has yielded a fuller access to the structural components of the supertext considered. The study has taken into account two sememes of each derivative - those of its stem and of its affix. As the article demonstrates, the semantics of the derivatives largely depends on the realisations of the supertext which they are part of. It has been revealed that a number of the derivatives analysed have the status of rare or nonce-words. The stem of the derivative ensures a concrete filling of a general schematic or frame-type action expressed by the affix. Set phrases (114) and phraseological units (15) with the word London have been considered as realisations of various semantic components of the London text. These units and phrases account for the inclusion of the supertext into intertextual paradigms, and reflect the standard object-to-object relations that are typical of the British civilisation. Among the set phrases, the article distinguishes compound non-idiomatic nominations (75), bound non-idiomatic terms (25), and phraseological units featuring various degrees of idiomaticity (14). Phraseological units permit tracing the historical stages in the formation of the London text, and testify to a high frequency of the use of its name. Phraseological units also incorporate realisations of the peripheral components of the supertext, resulting from the actualisation of its idiolectal semantic components.