Victoria Makhnitska
(Kamyanets-Podilskiy Ivan Ohiyenko National University)
Scientific Supervisor: M.V. Matkovska, Senior Lecturer
THE SEMANTIC PECULIARITIES OF THE CONCEPT SACREDNESS IN JAMES JOYCE’S NOVEL “A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN”
Our aim is to analyze the cognitive constituents of the concept SACREDNESS and figure out the prototypical and marginal components.
In order to provide a broader perspective for our analysis, let us examine a few preliminary assumptions: directionalities of mapping in cognitive extensions (from source to target domains) display the following characteristic tendencies; from prototypical to less prototypical (from central to peripheral); from specific and/or basic level schema to more general (higher order) schema; from concrete (experientially tangible/perceptually salient) to more abstract (mental); from root domain to epistemic domain; from quantitative domain to qualitative domain
[1, p. 176–181].
So, the above can be verified against experiential data; they also lend themselves to a deeper analysis in the developmental dimension.
Since the first step toward cognitive change is the emergence of polysemy in a lexical item (i.e., polysemic split), this network model should also be suitable for simulating semantic change. The question then is what happens within the network when polysemy moves on to semantic change. Obviously, one extension from the global prototype, i.e., one of the senses of the polysemous lexical item in question, will gradually become detached from the original network. In terms of the underlying cognitive processes, this should happen when a given entity that has formerly been conceptualized as a derivation from a prototypical center of a category is recognized as a central member of a new category. Cognitive change occurs in the polysemy network when one of the nodes (probably a local prototype) becomes detached by being raised to the status of a new global prototype in a network of its own. I would term this process prototypicalization and claim that a local prototype constitutes an instance which has already started out on this course.
Moreover, in both cases, i.e. of polysemy and synonymy, we should not ignore such vagaries of mental processing as focal adjustments (i.e. viewpoint and attention shifs: voluntary and involuntary changes of location of attention), processing depth (also related to mental energy, depth of penetration and processing time), attention span (profiled by temporal and mental energy domains), previous experience and attitudes and many other less tangible factors determining cognitive processing; by the same token the question of prototypicality and specificity can be highly deobjectivised and left open to individual interpretations.
As R. Jackendoff has pointed out, lots of meaning motivation is inherent in the meaning and its motivation of lexical units that are diachronically earlier
[1, p. 159–161]. Cognitive change that consists in metaphorical extensions (mapped from an earlier onto a later meaning of a lexical unit or root) often renders the original meaning opaque. A similar tendency can be noticed while observing the emergence of radial categories in a small child at very early stages of the development and calibration of conceptual structure. What is equally important is the fact that we use the newly acquired units of language automatically and effortlessly. In the diachronic perspective we cannot, of course, trace back the original meaning of a given unit further than a few millennia due to the limited availability of written records, but this limitation should not discourage us from attempts to explore meaning in the diachronic dimension and acknowledge its significance for synchronically oriented analyses: “O, Lord, open our lips and our mouths shall announce Thy praise. Incline unto our aid, О God! O, Lord, make haste to help us! to pray – to praise – to demand – to ask” [2, p. 19–26].
Even a superficial examination of the varied data collated above shows that most of the items bearing their affiliation to the concept of importance display a definite perceptual and experiential saliency, which in most cases can be described as a trajectory/landmark relation. Many of the lexical units lend themselves to description not only in terms of their etymological and morphological structure, but also in terms of image schema and primary domains. In most of the cases above one cannot resist the temptation to assume that the concept of importance can be grasped through the following ontological metaphor: Importance is a discontinuity within the perceptual held which draws and holds attention. In other words, importance can be understood as a salient entity that our perception can detect from other (background) information, and our attention can hold as worth further ‘importation’ into the realm of our mental (autonomous) processing. This is, for example, how we notice spelling errors.
Thus we encounter two important aspects of our peripherally connected cognitive processing. One in perception and the other is in attention. One would talk about scanning an image within a perceptual field (which hinges on the act of comparison, the fundamental cognitive ability). Scanning can be most briefly described as the comparison between standard and target within a perceptual field, often represented as S > T. The simplest example of a perceptual event can be a one-dimensional linear distance), thus we can talk of a close /distant similarity detection of a discrete point against a background. It is a very simple instance of figure/ground alignment. Also lots of extra information about the cognitive ability of comparison can be derived from the analysis of such concepts as difference and similarity.
So, we may summarize that the internal, mental field consists of the memory-knowledge landscape, which compresses our past experience, and is subject to constant change, updating and redefining. Language can also show certain aspects of memory and knowledge in terms of external perceptually discernible domains, e. g. colorful and vivid memories (= entities within the memory space), or clouded, sharp or photographic memory (=qualifying the memory field), broad and deep knowledge, or superficial knowledge etc.
REFERENCES
- Jackendoff R. Language of the mind: Essays on mental representation. Cambridge (Mass.), 1992. 216 p.
- Joyce James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. London, PENGUIN BOOK, 1996. 288 p.