Conceptogram of the song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” and its foreign-language paratexts
Abstract
The object of the research is the text of the English-language anti-war song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” and its foreign-language versions (paratexts), while the subject of the article is the song’s conceptogram. The aim of the study is to clarify the ways and means of objectification and subjectivation of the concepts of the song in texts of different status. The work is based on the methodological principles of the cognitive-discursive paradigm of linguistics with an emphasis on methods of conceptual analysis.
The study has revealed that each foreign-language paratext of the song is created according to a clearly defined algorithm corresponding to its content and form, largely determined by the original’s overarching anti-war pathos, which portrays war as an evil.
The conceptogram is a symbiotic configuration of mental units, specific for a certain text or group of texts. The song’s conceptogram consists of textual explicature-based concepts (domains, autochthons, allochthons) and subtextual implicature-based concepts (existential and negatively emotive). At the same time, a number of semantically important concepts in the song are objectivated only in its specific national versions or are not verbalized at all, remaining in the subtext, or even dispersed in the textual matter. It has been found out that among the linguistic signs of the song the most dispersed is the concept of TIME, due to which it turns out to be a global mentefact for this song. The concept TIME is grammatically actualized through the perspective of ‘the past’.
The study demonstrates that the song’s textual concepts of various types possess lexical-semantic valence, which enables them to form intertype relations governed by interconceptual correlations associated with the genre, theme, and the author’s idiostyle. The same factors also regulate the synonymous representation of concepts in the national versions of the song. Against this background, the limited lexical resources available for structuring the concept corpus remain evident, resulting from restrictions on deviations from the core ideological and artistic line of the texts.
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Sources for illustrations
LyricsTranslate. (n.d.). “Where have all the flowers gone?”: Translations into different languages. Retrieved December 16, 2025, from https://lyricstranslate.com/en/where-have-all-flowers-gone-fang-hua-he-suo-qu.html
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