In the face of. Focus shift in conditions of active language contacts

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of the influence of international languages on each other at the level of cognitive structures. The paper considers the mistakes made by the interpreters of international organizations in the design of the left and right context of the preposition in the face of, and it is concluded that the reason for such errors is the wrong choice of the conceptual base of the preposition in the conditions of competition between two metaphorical cognitive models – CONFRONTATION and APPEAL (with a model COURT). The base imposes referential, morphological and semantic restrictions on the filling of the left and right context of the preposition in the face of. The study of the materials of the National Corpus of the Russian Language, including the historical corpus, showed that the cognitive model APPEAL was more often activated by those who wrote in Church Slavonic, and then in Russian, then the model CONFRONTATION. The established discursive practice ensured the dominance of the cognitive model APPEAL in cognitive structures of modern Russian speakers. An analysis of the use of in the face of and face à, as well as other phraseological units with face in English and face in French, showed that the cognitive model CONFRONTATION is more significant for their speakers. Currently, under the influence of the languages of global communication in the Russian language, there is an increase in the compatibility of the preposition in the face of and an increase in the importance of the cognitive model CONFRONTATION.