| Summary: | The article deals with the trends of historical dynamics of linguistic and cognitive characteristics of the concept Canada in English-Canadian poetic texts of the 18th–21st centuries. This research deploys a complex semantic and cognitive analysis of its lexical-semantic nominative means of poetic texts. As a result specific features of national, cultural and author’s knowledge encoded in the poetic texts are identified and classified. The lexical nominative means of the concept Canada are viewed in terms of two groups of nominative means: direct and figurative. All the nominations are classified according to several criteria. Direct and figurative nominative means of the concept Canada variously characterize physical, geographical, territorial, demographic, social, political, historical, and cultural features of the Canadian state. The variability in priority of thematic nomination groups of the concept Canada in different historical periods of the statehood formation reveals the influence of the extralingual factors on the authors’ selection of nominative means of the concept Canada. The concept Canada combines the features of both a literary, cultural and a toponymic concept. It has been modeled as a complex two-component structure that includes a sensory-notional and a figurative component. Historically conditioned transformations of the structural components of the concept Canada is interpreted in terms of its invariant and diachronically variable linguistic and cognitive characteristics. During three periods of Canadian history, the transformations of the structural components of the concept Canada reveal themselves as either the hierarchic shifts of the literary concepts-slots in the sensory-notional component or as the variability of the set of conceptual metaphors in its figurative component.
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