Concept as mental representation of supertext

The article defines the concept as the result of categorization from the standpoint of cognitive linguistics; it overviews the variety of scientific approaches to this mental entity. The article assumes that the concept is not a rigorous ontological taxonomy, but rather a diffusive set, formed with the involvement of diverse paradigms. The basic concepts of a culture or its cultural constants are regarded as the mental representations of its supertexts i.e. text models resulting from the convergence of texts from the semantic field studied. The difference between these two abstract constructs lies in the fact that the concept contains non-verbalized features and the supertext has strict algorithms of their predication and verbalization in syntactic chains deployed from the common paradigm. The article delimitates the meaning of a lexical unit, the conceptual content and the supertextual structure. It is accepted that meaning is a unit of the semantic level, or an element of the system of linguistic meanings related to how a particular lexeme functions; the concept is a unit of the cognitive-conceptual level, which incorporates the mental features of a particular phenomenon; it is not a combination of seems, which are singled out differentially. The article also emphasizes the potential of verbalizing the concept in both key words and supertexts of a culture. The article comes up with a semantic scheme of reconstructing the concept via analyzing the recurrent syntactic structures from the textual tradition; it stresses the necessity of turning to the literary text when studying concepts and their verbalizations, as the concept does not only contain features that are “objectively true”. The concept is a multidimensional verbal and non-verbal construct embedded in the system of human experience; it exists in the cultural space - the global assumptive universe of a people, which contains the set of axiological values and is extant over a certain historic period.