CATASTROPHE in English Pop Culture: A Cognitive-semiotic Perspective

The paper addresses verbal means that represent the notion of catastrophe / disaster in present-day English rock lyrics. The article employs an interdisciplinary approach that treats categorization patterns and respective semiotic phenomena as irrational rationalization and myth-oriented semiosis. The concept of CATASTROPHE embodies human experience of systems’ rapid transformations that cause their structural and functional breakdown or annihilation. The paper discusses the reconstructed irrational “nano-myth” behind the semantics of CATASTROPHE’s designations and suggests a formal logical model of a catastrophic event. The article highlights the cognitive premises of language units verbalizing the said concept in rock lyrics. Respective frame-type cognitive structures are arranged within the framework of a universal model of an open system.