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| 1 | Introduction. The theoretical background of the research is a set of principles and assumptions of cognitive linguistics to the study of the meaning of a linguistic form in the context of other cognitive structures. The theoretical perspective of the paper is to consider semantic shifts of the verb find. The goal of the research is to highlight cognitive mechanisms underlying alternative construal of the situations conceptualized by the verb find and reveal cognitive strategies of verbal semantic derivation. Material and methods. The research is based on the empirical data from available sources and corpora data. The study is conducted within the framework of cognitive semantics where language meaning is viewed as knowledge structure. Results and discussion. The paper considers the phenomenon of lexical polysemy from a cognitive perspective. Of particular concern is the issue of semantic extension of the polysemantic verb find. The study brings into focus such parameters of the verbal meaning as taxonomic category of the verb, semantic roles of the participants and their referential status. It is argued that the change of any parameter causes semantic shifts of the lexical meaning of the verb find. The paper discusses two taxonomic categories of the verb find “achievements” and “happenings”. The author comes to the conclusion that the semantic difference between the constructions like Finally he found the wallet and He found a coin in the dust lies in the semantic component “+control”/“–control”. The study highlights semantic and syntactic features of the controlled and non-controlled situations conceptualized by the agentive meaning and non-agentive meaning of the verb find. Conclusion. The results of the research reveal that the change of the taxonomic category of the verb is a cognitive mechanism of verbal semantic derivation. The results obtained may be helpful for further study of productive semantic derivation processes in the framework of cognitive semantics. Keywords: сonceptualization, cognitive model, language meaning, polysemy, semantic derivation, controlled situation, non-controlled situation | 1444 | ||||