DIACHRONIC STUDY OF THE JOY CONCEPT REPRESENTATION IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE BASED ON CORPUS LINGUISTICS METHODS

The article studies JOY concept explication evolution from the Middle English to the Modern English. The research is based on the provisions of diachronic conceptology, linguoconceptology, as well as on the results of emotional concepts representation researches. The present research is relevant due to the insufficient development of the theoretical foundations of the study of JOY concept evolution in the English language; the interdisciplinary feature of the research; the significance of the emotional concepts for any culture. Moreover, the present research is carried out within the framework of diachronic conceptology using corpus linguistics methods. The methodological basis of the study consists of semantic-cognitive, component definitional, etymological and corpus analysis methods (collocation analysis method). The use of the presented methods provides an integrative interdisciplinary approach to the JOY concept description. The research material is articles from explanatory dictionaries of Middle English (Middle English Dictionary) and Modern English (Oxford English Dictionary, Cambridge English Dictionary), as well as data from corpus databases (Corpus of Middle English, Corpus of Contemporary American English, British National Corpus) with a total volume of 1,100,000 300 texts. As a result, constant and associative features of the studied concept have been identified. The research of changes in the composition of the nominative field core show that the constant feature of the JOY concept is pleasure. Associations change from something divine, heavenly, to something more real, material, mundane. In Modern English, the JOY concept is reflected through an anthropomorphic metaphor. In the course of time, there appear more idiomatic expressions that make it possible to comprehend the concept under study.