THE ROLE OF THE INTERNAL FORM IN LINGUOCOGNITIVE RESEARCH (ON THE MATERIAL OF THE ENGLISH-LINGUISTIC CONCEPT OF DIGNITY)

Abstract

The article is devoted to the consideration of the concept “internal form” in the context of modern linguistic research. The genesis of this term is revealed and its essential characteristics are established. It is noted that the internal form is the basis of the lexical meaning of the word, which constitutes its primary image and affects the evolution of its semantics. It is known that the products of cognition are engraved in language, so the study of internal form allows us to trace, on the one hand, the features of verbalization of conceptualized fragments of reality, and on the other hand – to establish how certain concepts are understood through each other at the level of mental lexicon. Different views on the problem of the internal form of the word in the diachronic dimension are highlighted. The ideas of both the founders of this term, in particular of W. von Humboldt, O.O. Potebnia, L. Wittgenstein, and linguists of the XX–XXI centuries – of V.V. Vinogradov, O.S. Kubryakova are considered. A critical analysis of linguists' views on the problem of internal form suggests that it is the relation of the content of thought to consciousness. The study of the internal form in the context of linguocognitivism allowed us to establish how certain ideas are comprehended in the human mind due to the images that form the basis of the semantics of the nominative units. This allowed us to trace the mechanisms of apperceptive perception, metaphorical thinking and establish the principles of asymmetric dualism of the linguistic sign, when each signifier tries to expand the extensional of denoted phenomena, while each signified “seeks” to express itself through more nominative units. The theoretical basis of the problem of internal form was used to analyze two key verbalizers of the linguistic concept DIGNITY – “dignity” and “virtue”. As a result of the analysis of each verbalizer, cognitive classificational and differential features were distinguished. It was found that the basis of the image of the lexeme “dignity” is the classifier “acceptance”, while the image of the lexeme “virtue” is the classifier “humane”.