The concept of disease in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s language picture of the world: On the example of the story “Cancer ward”

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to analyze the meaning potential of the concept DISEASE in the symbolic story “Cancer Ward” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Using the method of continuous sampling, the author has selected the contexts that most clearly illustrate the semantics and functioning of language units that organize the concept under study. These contexts are subject to cognitive and semantic analysis; the author also has used general scholarly methods of describing and classifying linguistic phenomena and units and the method of quantitative treatment of language data (the statistical one). The research is based on a method of conceptual analysis that has given a semantic nucleus of the concept (lexemes: disease, cancer, tumor and their derivatives), a prenuclear zone (lexemes: lymph nodes, metastases, melanoblastoma) and peripheral zone (lexemеs: treatment, surgery, diagnosis, injection, recovery, healing, etc.). Conceptual analysis method made it possible to state that the semantic structure of the concept DISEASE combines two centers of meaning: a severe oncological disease and an extremely painful state of society affected by the totalitarian regime. The comparative method
plays an important role in the work, leading to the conclusions about autosemantism of some lexemes and the presence of attributive propagators in other lexemes, about the peculiarities of coordination of the predicative combination of words (e.g., ‘tumor has bitten’) about the lexical homonymity of certain nouns. The methods of contextual and discursive analysis have been widely used to identify the constituents of the concept DISEASE, which have made it possible to detect intertextual relationships, to define patterns, to identify moral and philosophical problems of the story, related to the political situation in the USSR in the 1950s and the public position of the writer.

Keywords:

concept, nuclear peripheral organization, semantics, lexical derivative, textual representation, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn