The thesis focuses on the peculiarities of the historical dynamics of the linguistic and cognitive characteristics of CANADA concept in English-Canadian poetic texts of the XVIII–XXI centuries by a complex semantic and cognitive analysis of its lexical-semantic nomination means in the poetic texts analyzed. The thesis is carried out in accordance with cognitive and linguopoetic approaches to the investigation of poetic texts, that helps to study the specificity of national, cultural and authors’ knowledge encoded in the English-Canadian poetic texts of the XVIII–XXI centuries, and to determine the tendencies of its historical variation under the influence of historic and cultural events and literary trends in Canada of this period. The lexical nomination means of CANADA concept (direct and figurative), classified according to their structural, morphological, semantic peculiarities and topically, variously characterize physical, geographical, territorial, demographic, social, political, historical and cultural peculiarities of the Canadian state. The variability of prior thematic groups of CANADA concept nominative units in different historical periods of the statehood formation shows the influence of the extralingual factors on the authors’ selection of CANADA concept nomination means in English-Canadian poetic texts under study. Historically determined transformations of the structural components (sensory-notional and figurative) of CANADA concept, being a result of invariant and diachronically variable linguistic and cognitive concept characteristics, reveal themselves in alteration of the hierarchic arrangement of the concepts-slots of the sensory-notional component and in variability of the conceptual metaphors set of the figurative component in three time dimensions.
Key words: CANADA concept, dynamics, diachronic variations, historical invariant, variable linguistic and cognitive characteristics, sensory-notional component, figurative component, lexical-semantic means of the concept nomination, literary concept-slot, conceptual metaphor.
