Abstract

This study investigates the meaning of the concept “woman” in contemporary English prose. As an example, the author analyzes one of the key elements of the national conceptual sphere—the concept “woman”—which is developed and transmitted through modern fiction. This is explained by the macrostructure of the concept, which predetermines the distribution of selected characteristics according to the structural macro-components of the concept—imaginative, informational component, and interpretation field; the categorical structure of the concept, which presents the cognitive hierarchy of the classification criteria, conceptualizes the consequent subject or phenomenon; and the field organization of the concept. The subject of research is the semantics of lexemes that make up the designated concept in English in modern prose. The research was carried out on the material of three modern English novels. The main slots of the concept frame in the concept “woman” in contemporary English prose are occupied by beauty, fashion, love and sex, work and life, lifestyle, news and politics, career, psychology, and relationships. This concept is verbalized not only due to the semantic connections of the lexeme “woman” in the usage but also due to words and phrases that acquire new meanings in the context through the connections realized by a certain word or phrase in this novel. Thus, the concept “woman” in contemporary English prose is perceived as the basic unit of human memory, which structures the mental space of a person; it is cognitive and semantic universal onto the cognitive level in the development of lexical meaning.