MAIN APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY VERBS IN LINGUISTICS

Mental activity verbs represent an important lexical-semantic group in linguistics, as they reflect cognitive processes such as thinking, knowing, remembering, understanding, and believing. These verbs play a significant role in expressing intellectual and psychological states of a speaker. The study of mental activity verbs has attracted the attention of linguists from various theoretical perspectives including semantic, cognitive, functional, and psycholinguistic approaches. Within linguistic research, mental verbs are considered as a key component of the lexical system because they reflect how language conceptualizes human thought and knowledge. The semantic nature of these verbs is closely connected with cognitive processes and mental representations that occur in the human mind. Different scholars have analyzed mental verbs from the viewpoint of semantic classification, conceptual modeling, and syntactic behavior. In modern linguistics, mental activity verbs are also studied within the framework of cognitive linguistics where they are interpreted as linguistic manifestations of conceptual structures and mental models. This article analyzes the main theoretical approaches to the study of mental activity verbs in linguistics and highlights their semantic, cognitive, and functional characteristics. The research emphasizes the importance of mental verbs in understanding the interaction between language, thought, and cognition.