COGNITIVE ANALYSIS AS A METHOD FOR STUDYING LANGUAGE PHENOMENA

The article considers the main processes of cognition of the world and the units that represent the results of these processes. The purpose of the article is to analyze the causes of the significant contradictions in the interpretation of the conceptual construct of cognitive linguistics. A consistent differentiation of the three main stages of the Learning and Understanding the World (categorization, conceptualization and linguistic consciousness), as well as the structures representing the results of these processes, will allow a new explication of many grammatical phenomena in traditional linguistics. The currently discrepancies in the interpretation of basic cognitive terms are associated with ignoring of conceptual (intellectual) categories, that belong to the sphere of consciousness, which operates with innate or acquired categories, not with ontological categories. Many linguists identify these categories on the base of certain ontological features with classifiers, which only reflect an extralinguistic reality, and consider them insignificant for language describing. The authors conclude that the conceptual categories play a decisive role in representing situational knowledge, which allows thinking the same event in different perspectives, without disturbing the nominative identity of lexical units. These conceptual categories find their realization in the mind of a person through a variety of universal frame structures. The frame structures are interpreted at the level of linguistic consciousness through propositions as an intralinguistic interpretation of a universal frame.Specificity of linguistic consciousness manifests itself in essential grammatical formations, which are of an individual character and are typical of a specific language.