COGNITIVE WORD-FORMATION? (ІNVITATION TO DISCUSSION)

Abstract

Currently, there is an active implementation of the foundations and principles of cognitive linguistics in all the disciplines of the science of language, levels and subsystems of various natural codes: attempts are being made to substantiate cognitive morphology, cognitive semantics, cognitive lexicology, cognitive stylistics right up to cognitive word formation. The article makes an attempt to understand whether it is possible to talk about cognitive word formation (or cognitive derivatology in foreign terminology), and whether there is a specificity of this direction in the study of its processes as opposed to traditional approaches to its study. In our opinion, the application of general principles of cognitive science and its mechanisms to the study of certain word-formation processes in modern developed languages does not in fact bring anything new to the development of the word-forming science, except for "modernizing" the terminology traditionally used in it. Apparently, in the word formation, which is primarily closely related to the system-structural properties of the language, and not to the thinking activity of its carriers (here we compare spontaneous occasional formations according to the available in the language derivational models with "flagrant" violations of all semantical and stylistic norms), the use of mechanisms and procedures of cognitive linguistics in their classical understanding is hardly advisable. At the same time, it is possible not to exclude the use of the term "cognitive word-formation model" if it is followed by one or another onomasiological category and then the field space in which it is realized. Associated with a specific situation or frame, it can include different realizations which differ in their formal-semantic and functional genres, as it is a kind of deep structure in its most generalized meaning. This is not a pure abstraction, but a collection of real formal and significant features expressed by concrete language means and forming a whole within a fragment in the structure of our knowledge of the world.