Филологические науки/ 7. Язык, речь, речевая коммуникация

Бобошко А. М., Бобошко Ю. М.

Винницкий государственный педагогический университет, Украина

The concept as it is represented in modern linguistics

The term “concept” is used in mainstream cognitive science and philosophy of mind. A concept is an abstract idea or a mental symbol, typically associated with a corresponding representation in a language or symbology [2; 64].

Today linguists agree that:

1) concepts are abstract in that they omit the differences of the things in their extension, treating the members of the extension as if they were identical. Classical concepts are universal in that they apply equally to everything in their extension;

2) concepts are also the basic elements of propositions, much the same way a word is the basic semantic element of a sentence. Unlike perceptions, which are particular images of individual objects, concepts cannot be visualized [3; 68];

3) concepts are expected to be useful in dealing with reality. Generally speaking, concepts are taken to be (a) acquired dispositions to recognize perceived objects as being of this kind or of that ontological kind, and at the same time (b) to understand what this kind or that kind of object is like, and consequently (c) to perceive a number of perceived particulars as being the same in kind and to discriminate between them and other sensible particulars that are different in kind [8; 34-37];

4) concepts are bearers of meaning, as opposed to agents of meaning. A single concept can be expressed by any number of languages. The fact that concepts are in some sense independent of language makes translation possible - words in various languages have identical meaning, because they express one and the same concept.

Several partly or fully distinct concepts may share the same term. These different concepts are easily confused by mistakenly being used interchangeably, which is a fallacy. Also, the notions of term and concept are often confused, although the two are not the same [6; 44].

Although the mainstream literature in cognitive science regards the concept as a kind of mental particular, it has been suggested by some theorists that concepts are real things.

Traditionally, content analysis has most often been thought of in terms of conceptual analysis. In conceptual analysis, a concept is chosen for examination, and the analysis involves quantifying and tallying its presence.

On analyzing main approaches in the sphere of concept understanding, let's briefly introduce today's views on conceptual analysis. It begins with identifying research questions and choosing a sample or samples. Once chosen, the text must be coded into manageable content categories. The process of coding is basically one of selective reduction. By reducing the text to categories consisting of a word, set of words or phrases, the researcher can focus on, and code for, specific words or patterns that are indicative of the research question [4; 81].

The focus of study linguistic concept in use is oriented on how our mental representations guide our linguistic output. Thus, linguists are interested in how humans structure their experience and represent information about the world, for instance, about the orientation of objects in a room or an agent’s movement through space, and the linguistic consequences of such representations. Experimental psychology provides us with a rich body of data on how humans may store spatial knowledge. For instance, a large body of research shows that one such representation of spatial knowledge may be as a mental model [5; 91-92].

Variability in linguistic strategies has been investigated in great detail in register theory, in which it is held that the situation has a great impact on the speakers’ linguistic choices. However, what we can observe when we look at situated talk is that the speakers’ concepts of the situation may be very different, and that these differences are strongly reflected in the participants’ linguistic behaviour. What a situation consists in is therefore also determined by the speakers’ mental representation of it. Thus, the problem is not only that we find a diversity of possible representations, but there may also be a variety of strategies of using them, depending on the speakers’ conceptualization of what the situation consists in. We therefore need to look at actual situations and investigate the concepts in use [1; 152].

In cognitive linguistics, the relationship between linguistic structure and general cognitive structures also constitutes the focus of linguistic investigation. Cognitive linguistics however usually does not consider the conditions of usage of the cognitive structures as they are encoded in linguistic structures, and may, for instance, only provide lists of possible cognitive metaphors. For example, metaphorical concepts of the same phenomenon may sometimes have opposite orientations. Cognitive linguistic analysis reveals the different underlying concepts, but usually does not show the conditions of variability for the different orientations [7; 23].

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