Ametkhan E. Dzhemalyadinov, undergraduate

                                                      Bukovyna State Finance Academy

                                                      Chernivtsi, Ukraine

The Money Conceptual System in the English worldview

Conceptual analysis is currently undergoing a revival despite the enormous impact of naturalism in philosophy and a long history of proposed analyses being subjected to counterexample after counterexample [4,253-282.]. This renewed interest is due to a number of philosophers who have reinterpreted the role of conceptual analysis in philosophy. Recent advocates of conceptual analysis include George Bealer, David Chalmers, Frank Jackson, and David Lewis (among others).

On the contrary, conceptual analysis being employed in linguistics reveals human-being’s cognition of the world and his/her verbalizing it. The conceptual analysis in linguistics presupposes concept modeling and concept description (cognitive informational structures) [5, 261-262].

The objective of the present paper is to define the way of the “money” concept semanticizing and the way of categorizing the English money concept system. First, it may help finance majors understand semantic taxonomy and its internal relationship s, second, it may help linguists follow the development of money semantics, and, third, it may help lingual culturologists determine typological and differential features inherent in the languages of a certain area [6].

Conceptual analysis has had a long and venerable history tracing back to the very origins of philosophy, but in the early XX-th c. it came to the thesis, following Carnap and others, that scientific concepts must be definable a priori and \ that it’s philosophy’s job to furnish the definitions. However, in the 1950s and 1960s, W.V.O. Quine and Hilary Putnam convinced many philosophers that this is a mistaken view. They highlighted the limits of a priori inquiry, noting that science sometimes overturns even our most cherished beliefs. Together with Saul Kripke (1972), H.Putnam also emphasized the fact that we can possess concepts in spite of being massively ignorant of, or mistaken about, the kinds our concepts pick out.

Categorization involves a psychological process in which an object,

event, etc. is judged to fall under a concept or term. F.Jackson emphasizes that

categorization isn’t random or miraculous. The main problem with this argument is that categorization doesn’t require analytic or a priori principles in order to operate [3;4].

Let’s take the “money” concept

Graph ¹1

Îâàë: Money                                                     

 


Coins
 
                                                             

 


SILVER
 

COPPER
 

GOLD
 
                                                  

1.                the coins or notes which are used to buy things, or the amount of these that

one person has. (Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary);

2.                something generally accepted as a medium of exchange, a measure of value

or a means of payment: as a: officially coined or stamped metal currency b: money of accounts, paper money  (Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary);

3.                a piece of metal, as gold, silver, copper, etc., coined, or stamped, and

4.                issued by the sovereign authority as a medium of exchange in financial transactions between citizens and with government; also, any number of such pieces; coin (English Dictionary for Word Games);

5.                medium of exchange: a medium of exchange issued by a government or other public authority in the form of coins of gold, silver, or other metal, or paper bills, used as the measure of the value of goods and services (Encarta® World English Dictionary);

6.                a commodity, such as gold, or an officially issued coin or paper note that is

legally established as an exchangeable equivalent of all other commodities,

such as goods and services , and is used as a measure of their comparative

values on the market (American Heritage Dictionary);

Though for the linguists the results of the definitional analysis and then the results of the componential analysis prove the validity of the previous thesis. Consequently, the semantic analysis of money nominations in, for example, the finance discourse will reveal a more general component as “finance”. Likewise in the economics discourse it will reveal the component “economy”. Therefore the more discourses we employ for the semantic analysis the more components can be registered in the nomination. Here we can have a semantic structure o money nomination in language competence and in discourse or language performance. We believe that the semantic structure must have some empty positions in the language system while in the discourse they are filled in.

Perhaps it makes sense to distinguish between categorization (which is often based on minimal perceptual contact) on the fragment level, like medium of exchange, and categorization on the system level, like finance or economics. In the second case we observe the transportation of components of meaning:

dominant component à periphery component, e,g.:

medium of exchange à pound (dollar, banknote, property, currency, )

periphery component à dominant component, e.g.:

cash (credit card, deposit account, wealth, heritage, stock,) à medium of exchange

Conceptual analysis comes into the picture as the means of identifying the essential feature of the unit used in a definite discourse, for example:

property, wealth, economy, property, bank ( credit, loan, interest rate)

exchange (hard/soft  currency, exchange rate, pound, dollar, rouble,

hryvnia, euro. cent, penny, kopiyka), civilization (Middle Ages, epoch, period

nation, country, people), etc.