Memory From a Linguistic and Socio-Cultural Perspective

The article explores the linguistic characteristics of the concept of memory as one of the key cultural concepts among other meaningful ones — person, life, language, word. The starting point was the position that memory is a psychological category that is verbalized in different ways by linguistic means, models synonymous series, mental image forms. It is noted that the word-concept memory correlates with the words consciousness, memory, imagination, mind, knowledge through the prism of individual and collective experience of the past, and acts as a tool for evaluating human existence. In a comparative aspect, the semantics of the Ukrainian verb to remember and the Czech zapomnět, as well as the related nouns nezabudka and pomněnka, are considered. Verbs, having at first glance a similar grammatical structure, are characterized by antonymic meanings in modern literary languages. The factors that led the original semantic feature of the root pomn- (memor- пам’ят-) — «to remember» — to develop to the opposite meaning in the Czech verb zapomnět «to forget / not to remember something» are analyzed. It was noted that under the influence of other Slavic languages, the parallel use in the XVI–XVII c. in the Ukrainian language, two words — «пам’ятати / помнити» — led to the fact that the word to remember displaced the word to remember from usage. The semantics of ʽmemory’ in the interpretation of figurative means — metaphors and phraseology, which show signs of high semantic stability, reproducibility in the language from memory, and thus have the status of collective memories. The evidence presented in the article shows that the conceptual field of memory is structured by concepts that are relevant both for the individual and for the whole human community in a particular time dimension and have a high axiological potential.