Cognitive-semantic mechanisms of collective conceptualization in English animal community nominations: a corpus-based analysis
English animal group nouns not only denote groups of animals but also reflect different ways of construing multiple entities as a unified whole, making their role in the conceptualization of collectivity a relevant object of cognitive-semantic research. Although previous studies have examined collective nouns, cognitive profiling, metaphorical extension, and evaluative meaning from different theoretical perspectives, the interaction of these mechanisms in the use of animal group nouns remains insufficiently explored. The present study focuses on six such lexical items – herd, pack, flock, swarm, pride, and colony – and aims to identify the cognitive-semantic mechanisms underlying their literal and metaphorically extended uses. The data were retrieved from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) for the period 2010 – 2019. Of the initial 2,563 contexts, 1,804 were retained after manual screening: 773 were classified as literal and 1,031 as metaphorically extended. The methodology involved distinguishing between literal and metaphorically extended uses in accordance with the principles of MIPVU, identifying cognitive profiling parameters, inductively generalizing these parameters into higher-order construal types, and conducting a contextual analysis of evaluative potential. The results show that metaphorically extended uses project selected characteristics of animal group organization onto social, technological, and abstract phenomena. The identified profiling parameters were grouped into four higher-order construal types: Agentive, Passive, Dynamic, and Structural. The analysis suggests that the evaluative tendencies associated with these types emerge through the interaction between the profiled characteristics and the immediate discourse context rather than constituting fixed components of lexical meaning. The study is limited to six selected nominations and COCA data from 2010 – 2019; therefore, the proposed typology should be regarded as an analytical generalization rather than an exhaustive classification. The findings indicate an interrelationship between uniplexing, cognitive profiling, metaphorical extension, and evaluative potential in the conceptualization of collectivity.
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Zhemileva, М. М., Quero Gervilla, E. F. (2026). Cognitive-semantic mechanisms of collective conceptualization in English animal community nominations: a corpus-based analysis, Research Result. Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, 12 (3), 113–144.
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