The Fractal Nature of the Concept Harmony in the Modern English Discourse

The article focuses on the hypothesis that the concept, being defined as a complex system, possesses a fractal nature, where the core seme of the concept acts as an integrating link for the other elements of the nominative field of the concept. Today, the term "fractal" is widely adopted across various disciplines, including synergetics and linguistic synergetics. The fundamental idea of the fractal theory is that the composition of the whole is mirrored in its components, which is true for linguistic phenomena as complex systems that are structured based on the principle of infinite self-similarity, or fractality. The concept HARMONY is analysed in the article from the perspective of the development of complex systems, particularly those of a fractal-synergetic nature, like the conceptual framework of the English language, which follows a principle where quantitative changes result in qualitative transformations. This process can lead to the emergence of new linguistic and cognitive innovations, as well as modifications in the structure of pre-existing concepts. The usage of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), as well as dictionary definitions, for tracking the frequency of the lexeme HARMONY in the English language allowed the present study to observe the evolution of a concept from a sensory-visual image that serves as its foundation, gradually accumulating layers of meaning, to an open dynamic system, exhibiting a fractal structure. The existence of an inverse proportional relationship between the frequency rank of words and their number of occurrences provides a field for further research of the concept HARMONY in different contexts and genres.