GREIMASSIAN SEMIOTICS OF THE SENSIBLE REINTERPRETED FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF FUNCTIONAL GRAMMAR

Abstract

Conceptualization of various details of objective reality by linguistic consciousness is determined by the polymodality of perception which involves the unity of emotional, volitional, intellectual, and physical states. Therefore, the human cognitive activity results in the formation of a clear-cut category which generalizes and classifies the knowledge structures about perceptual, cognitive, and emotional facets of perception evolving around the accumulation of their similarities. The conceptual triad SENSE:FEELING:EMOTION composes the semiotic space of the so-called thymic category in modern English due to the fact that the verbal forms “sense”, “feeling”, “emotion” as well as their paradigmatic groupings correlate with the knowledge structures relevant to perceptual, cognitive, emotional aspects of perception. The conceptualization of perception is based on conventional situational structures of thymic information; the latter are recognized as frames. With regard to the fact that the units of knowledge organized into frames impose cognitive restraints on the process of texts perception, the valency index of the objectified components of the conceptual triad SENSE: FEELING:EMOTION was determined within one sentence. Considering the testimony of the predicative valency exponents, the concept FEELING proved to be both semantically and lexically most interpretive. It was also revealed that, when conceptualized in the discourse, the thymic processes are bound by the temporal relations. Semantic and grammatical adaptation of the objectified components of the conceptual triad SENSE:FEELING:EMOTION to the context of discourse is provided by the following stages: the initial one (instantaneous perception), the core one (emotional, interpersonal perception), and the terminal one (recognition). The complex frame “Someone realizes/does not realize their individual sensoryperceptual ability by perceiving someone/something with the upshot that sense converts/does not convert into feeling” was devised. The frame actualizes in a text provided that the former comprises: the thymic subject – living being/ the thymic quasi-subject – non-living being/the thymic subject – observer, the thymic information mediator and the thymic object/anti-object.