Prof.
V.V.Mykhajlenko
Bukovyna State Finance Academy
M.A. O.A.Hordyeyeva
Chernivtsi National University, Ukraine
Conceptualizing Finance in
Modern Anglophone Worldview
Cognitive
anthropocentrism is a fundamental notion of “anthropological linguistics”, which
explores the limits that the specific
structure of human perception imposes upon linguistic creativity. Anthropocentrism views
reality relative to a person, and maintains, directly or indirectly,
that a person is the measure of all
things. It is based on immediacy and experience, as validated by
sense-perception. Cognitive anthropocentrism is interwoven with cognitive
science, as an interdisciplinary study of how information is represented and
transformed in the brain. It comprises
psychology,
artificial
intelligence, philosophy,
neuroscience, learning sciences, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and education. Cognitive
linguistics has become one of the leading branches of cognitive science. [Geeraerts,1993]
Cognitive semantics
is of the subfields of cognitive linguistics, that studies language as a
container and an organizer [Langacker,1991] of knowledge within the human mind.
Thus it shares one basic property with pragmatics, namely, that language is not
analyzed as an abstract structure but as a human quality. Semantics, as the
theory of the relation between language and the world, is reformulated as
cognitive semantics referring to the theory of the relation between the
language and the mind's understanding of the world. It combines analysis of
cognitive structure, conceptual
structure and semantic structure.
The objective of
the present article is to reconstruct the conceptual model of Finance in Modern
Anglophone Worldview for its further verbalizing.
The basic unit of the
mental model is concept. Concept as a basic theoretical construct of cognitive linguistics in
conceptualization is used to denote
units of mental representation. Concepts may be verbalized, but a large amount
of concepts is preserved in human mind in the form of images, pictures, schemas
etc. According to E.S.Kubryakova
[3,85-95] concepts should be treated as counterparts of
words. The meaning of a word is a concept “bound by a sign”. Thus concepts are
independent of language and only some concepts are verbalized. Cognitive
linguistics opposes conceptual level with semantic one. As a rule only the most
important concepts acquire their verbal form. Words, which exist in a language,
show what concepts were relevant for a certain language speaking community in
the process of cognizing reality.
Concept can be
examined and verbalized through Conceptual analysis.
A conceptualization or conceptual
structure can be defined as an intensional semantic structure that encodes
implicit knowledge constraining the structure of a part of domain. The representation of a body of
knowledge is based on the specification of conceptualization.[Evans,Bergen,Zinken,2004]
A conceptualization is an abstract, simplified view
of the world that we wish to represent for some purpose. Every knowledge base,
knowledge-based system or agent is committed to some conceptualization,
explicitly or implicitly. For these systems, what "exists" is what
can be represented. When the knowledge of a domain is represented in a declarative formalism, the set of objects
that can be represented is called the universe of discourse.
Conceptual analysis comes into the picture as the means of
identifying the essential
beliefs. Since there must be
essential beliefs, conceptual analysis must be possible.
Table ¹1: Conceptual Analysis of the concept Finance :
According to the performed analysis concept Finance builds conceptual model
that encompasses 12 lexico-semantic
domain constituents: investment,
floatation, corporate finance, business ,funding, banking, management
direction, accumulation, capital account, economics, quaestor.
Finance, though in its turn is the constituent of more
generalized term Economics, that is
one of it’s lexico-semantic domain
constituents.
Table ¹2: Conceptual Analysis of the concept Economics:
The investigation illustrates the interdependency
between two conceptual systems: Finance
and Economics. As a result they are
closely interlaced and are domain constituents, that build the conceptual model
of Economics, as more generalized
concept and Finance as more specialized one.
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