Cognitive-Noematic Model Of The Taxonomy Of Attributives Within Philological Phenomenological Hermeneutics

Abstract

The article analyzes various lexical and morphological methods of both primary and secondary actualization of the noema "quality" in the structure of meaning. The main purpose of the article is to identify the kernel noema in the lexemes of attributive noematics. The lexemes that verbalize the primary noema “quality” in English, Japanese, and Karachay-Balkarian languages were used as the catalog for the analysis. The attributive lexemes are described with the use of the hermeneutic-noematic analysis involving the critical discourse analysis and the identification of transformations in the semantic structure. The problem of updating noems “quality”, “property”, “attribute” and others at the level of both noematics and its further consolidation in semantics is considered in the study as a basic criterion for creating a taxonomy of attributes of various structures and semantics. To solve the stated tasks, methods of etymological and component analysis were used. Noematics of attributes is a syncretic and movable formation with the only clearly updated element “quality”, which allows selecting a separate functional class of language units based on cognitive-noematic characteristics. In the process of identifying the noema “quality” and describing it as categorizing one, its “certainty” and “stability” in the process of verbalization of relations in reflexive reality are primarily relevant. A comprehensive cognitive-noematic model for identifying a generalizing component serves as a universal analysis algorithm for describing various functional-semantic classes in various language systems. The paper analyses the representation of the noema "quality" in term of the morphological type of language.

Keywords: Attributegrammatical aspectnoematicmorphologicalsemantics

Introduction

Within present investigation, we perform a comprehensive analysis of the category “quality”, which unites the entire space of similar attribute fields in the system of each specific language. By accounting the updated noems “quality” and “value” in the structure of the meaning of a lexical unit, the taxonomy of the considered linguistic phenomena is performed, depending on the morphological type of language. The paradigm signs of the categorizing noema “quality” can be traced in almost all languages; however, their implementation in the deep and superficial structure of the linguistic sign is very diverse. Within the explication of elementary noems, representing quanta of the hierarchical structures of the meaning, “quality” seems to be a generalizing dominant component. Noema as such is the smallest unit that establishes the connection and structurizes the relationships between the elements of the “communicative and practical situation” (Milovanova, 2005), which is the basis for the formation of a meaning.

Problem Statement

When constructing the taxonomy of the attributes as a single group of verbalizers of the noema "quality", it is first necessary to refer to the history of the issue.

In the study of "quality" as a kind of conceptual category, a long—though single-aspect—history of development can be observed. The majority of scientists recognize the existence of this mental category in the explication of a language system; however, as a conceptual concept—a universal unified for thinking in general and categorizing, in particular, human activity—it is distinguished with caution: “qualitative meanings <...> are universal and present in all languages” (Wolf, 1990, p. 472). Note that the unconditional linguistic universal is the category “evaluation”, which serves as a logical linguistic categorical design of the “modality constant” in the semantic structure (Bredikhin, 2015). Though, we believe that between “evaluation” and “quality” there is some kind of interrelation, as the natural interpretation of the phenomenon characteristics in the conceptually-valer system of the language community. That is why the generalizing noema "quality" is an integral structural component of the conceptually-valer system of a specific linguoculture.

Research Questions

The problem of updating the noems “quality”, “property”, “attribute”, etc. at the level of both noematics and its further consolidation in semantics, and its morphological and syntactic design, still remains a controversial issue and comes up against the efforts of researchers in various areas of linguistic science to bring this phenomenon under the morphological category, to identify the attribute part of speech "adjective". The definitions of this class of linguistic units are insufficient to cover all the possibilities of updating the categorizing noema, being exclusively characterizing coming only from the statement of the presence of one or another feature and reflecting in a generalized form the traditional views primarily based on the study of languages ​​of the Indo-European family. For instance, "quality is the presence of essential features, properties, features that distinguish one object or phenomenon from others” (Akhmanova, 1969, p. 47). In this definition, primary are “sign, property” which are only specifying but not generalizing elements of the categorizing noema “quality”. In the definition of an adjective as part of speech representing the category of “quality”, such class of units is considered within the sentence as a lexico-semantic class from functional perspective, i.e. morphologic-syntactic aspects of the selection of a separate attributive type of units also prevail: “Прилагательное (прилагательное) in English Adjective , in German Adjektiv, Eigenschaftswort... is a part of speech characterized by the categorical meaning of a sign, grammatical categories of degrees of comparison, gender, case, number (expressed as concord)” (Akhmanova, 1969, p. 314). This is also noted by the works of Wolf (1978) who characterized an adjective as a “lexico-semantic class of predicate words denoting a non-procedural characteristic (property) of a subject, event or other characteristic indicated by a name”. Based on such definitions, it is impossible to seamlessly combine the semantics, the external form and the functional specificity of the units that verbalize the category "quality". Therefore, they should not by limited by a certain part of speech. Indeed, the very etymology of the term “adjective” in the prefix element -ad means the noema “applicability to something”, i.e. the verbalizer of “quality” must accompany the naming of any object or phenomenon, which is not necessarily observed in all languages. With the understanding of the attribute in the emphasis of only the formal side of a category, we come up against the need for a material and shallow presentation of mentally objective concepts.

Purpose of the Study

The analysis is aimed at considering the ways of explication of the category “quality” as a basic representative for building a consistent taxonomy of attributes. In philosophical terms, the category “quality” is defined (along with the category “quantity”) as one of the basic categories. For our study, the most relevant is the definition based on the functional characteristics of the category and given in the work of Kokhanovsky (2003): “Quality is a philosophical category expressing the relative stability of objects and phenomena. Quality is such an internal certainty of a subject owing to which it is a given (and not another) subject, and with the change of which it turns into something else” (p. 292). Interestingly, the most important characteristic of the category “quality” is that it is not limited only by the perceptually defined properties of the object or phenomenon. Their apperception is much more important, i.e. cognitive processing of data and derivation of a common generalizing component, which, in essence, provides the “relative stability” referred to in the definition. Thus, in the process of identifying the noema “quality” and describing it as categorizing, its “certainty” and “stability” in the process of verbalization of relationships in a reflexive reality is primarily relevant. However, it also relates to the realization of the inherent potency of objects and phenomena, to not only meet the requirements of generality and sustainability by combining into categories, but also to preserve their specificity, i.e. to differ in their qualities. The internal characteristic of quality, after desobjectivation of the content, at this stage can be again dementalised and abstracted from the very objects and phenomena of the carriers and turn into an object of verbalization by other nominative language means.

Research Methods

Many studies have analyzed the hierarchical noematic structure of various units; however, the identification of a generalizing noema as a dominant categorizing feature of a whole group of lexemes in differently structured languages ​​has not been carried out. From our prespective, the use of an integrated technique for analyzing attributive structures based on the application of philological phenomenological hermeneutics, as the main method of analyzing the noematic structure of the meaning of the considered lexemes (which is a logical development of cognitive linguistics, hermeneutical phenomenology, philological hermeneutics and hermeneutic-noematic method) within the framework of explicating categorical noema “quality” is th most justified. To realize this goal, we considered it necessary to use the sequential hermeneutic-noematic method, as it is described in the works of Bredikhin and Serebryakova (2016):

1) characterizing the morphological type of the language system in aspects relevant for the interpretation of the statement;

2) comparing the contextual values and individual aspects of the semantic hierarchy of lexemes identified in a number of statements with data from lexicographic sources in order to verify and confirm sufficient definiteness of the generalized categorizing noema "quality";

3) analyzing the data of free associations, which are characteristic for the conceptual-valerian system of a specific linguoculture as a symbolic or background projection of the personal meaning;

4) comparing the componential structure of meaning with the noematic structure of meaning to identify various types of semantic structure transformations in the process of lexeme usage;

5) analyzing the noematic structure of meaning for the hierarchical re-decomposition and description of structural and noematic relations, identifying and structuring meta-units in action schemes for meaning-generation and decoding of the meaning of an attributive unit.

Findings

The problem of updating the noems “quality”, “property”, “attribute”, etc. at the level of both noematics and its further consolidation in semantics, and its morphological and syntactic design, still remains a controversial issue and comes up against the efforts of researchers in various areas of linguistic science to bring this phenomenon under the morphological category, to identify the attribute part of speech "adjective". The definitions of this class of linguistic units are insufficient to cover all the possibilities of updating the categorizing noema, being exclusively characterizing coming only from the statement of the presence of one or another feature and reflecting in a generalized form the traditional views primarily based on the study of languages of the Indo-European family. For instance, "quality is the presence of essential features, properties, features that distinguish one object or phenomenon from others”. In this definition, primary are “sign, property” which are only specifying but not generalizing elements of the categorizing noema “quality”. In the definition of an adjective as part of speech representing the category of “quality”, such class of units is considered within the sentence as a lexico-semantic class from functional perspective, i.e. morphologic-syntactic aspects of the selection of a separate attributive type of units also prevail: “Прилагательное (прилагательное) in English Adjective , in German Adjektiv, Eigenschaftswort... is a part of speech characterized by the categorical meaning of a sign, grammatical categories of degrees of comparison, gender, case, number (expressed as concord)” (Akhmanova, 1969, p. 472). This is also noted by the works of E.M. Wolf who characterized an adjective as a “lexico-semantic class of predicate words denoting a non-procedural characteristic (property) of a subject, event or other characteristic indicated by a name” (Wolf, 1978). Based on such definitions, it is impossible to seamlessly combine the semantics, the external form and the functional specificity of the units that verbalize the category "quality". Therefore, they should not by limited by a certain part of speech. Indeed, the very etymology of the term “adjective” in the prefix element -ad means the noema “applicability to something”, i.e. the verbalizer of “quality” must accompany the naming of any object or phenomenon, which is not necessarily observed in all languages. With the understanding of the attribute in the emphasis of only the formal side of a category, we come up against the need for a material and shallow presentation of mentally objective concepts.

The materiality in grammatical markers is realized by means of concrete morphemes with systemically fixed features as elements of linear representation of lexemes with semes ascribed and fixed in the language system: “by fixing the grammar meaning of the expression, the grammar is extra-linguistic reality and represents it in a definite, already language form” (Bredikhin, 2013, p. 56), as it happens in agglutinative and inflected languages. However, the verbalization of a general sign categorizing the class of language characteristic units may be absent in the structure. The verbalization of the noema “quality”, as a rule, occurs in the language systems under consideration using a variety of means, and one cannot decide whether these language units belong to a certain part of speech in non-inflected languages, in which relevant differentiation of lexico-grammatical classes differs radically from that in inflected ones. Indeed, in the Karachay-Balkar language, the familiar class of adjectivities is understood only as a derivative of the substantive: “new words are formed through root affixes, with a different meaning; that is adjectives are formed from nouns” (Zakhokhov & Sottaev, 1989, p. 108). In Japanese, this hypothetically distinguished class differs in functional features, which occurs due to the formation of their conjugation forms by time and mood.

As an empirical material, we have chosen a consistently-inflected Russian language, English language historically inflected with a penchant for analytism, and Japanese language agglutinative with a predominantly synthetic expression of grammatical meanings, all of them most fully characterizing the change in the paradigm of noematic content. We use pure structural types (Kazakh, Karachai-Balkarian), as well as languages of contaminated status (German) as background material for demonstrating the capabilities of hermeneutic-noematic analysis.

For instance: in Karachay-Balkar замансыз means early , premature (from заман , time); in Japanese 目 新 し い ( meatarasiy means original ) or 目 新 し か ろ う ( meatarasi karo means possibly original ) (morphological expression of probabilistic relationships in the attribute structure). In the aforementioned examples, there is no concord with the determinatum in the nominative group typical in inflectional languages, although the prepositional position remains: in Karachay-Balkar замансыз ёлюм means premature death , in Japanese 寒 か っ た 日  ( samu katta chi ) means a day that was cold (thr morphological expression of past tense in the attributive unit).

The indivisibility of some components in the attribute, their inclusion in the predicative relations on the description of the property as an object of statement makes us selecting not a lexical-grammatical group and not a lexical-semantic class, but a special class of units based on hermeneutic and noematic characteristics with a potency to verbalize the categorizing noema “quality”: “the construction of the deep <...> structure follows the principle of lexical preference ; when many alternative <...> categories are present in the desobjectivation <...> the preference is given to alternatives that are consistent with the most representative form” (Bredikhin & Serebryakova, 2016, p. 162).

This is confirmed by some studies of Russian scientists. For example, Potebnya (1968) at the cognitive-semantic level could not clearly delimit, even in the Russian language, the subject/phenomenon with all its intrinsic properties from these properties themselves, which proves the uncertainty of the phenomenon “feature” itself, because as such, being predetermined in something, it remains uncertain in terms of content. Obviously, such indiscreet character is based on the historical evolution of verbalization methods of the noemata “quality”, “correlation”, “attribute” and “property”, which were primarily updated as original participle of a word.

Let us study several prerequisites for the modern state of the verbalization capabilities of the noema “quality” in multi-structural languages.

Inflected languages, regardless of the manifestation of analytical aspects, for example, English in the process of transition from sequential synthesis to analytical forms, change the formal markers of attributive units as inseparably bounded with the verbalization of the categorizing noema "quality". The binding to the coordination of attributive and nominative units in the process statement generation has disappeared, but the formal morphological markers of "quality" have preserved, not fully though: in Old Engl . eald bōc means ealda bōci , but old book means old books . In the modern English language system, the categorizing noema “quality” is verbalized by several morphological markers: 1) in the class of adjectives, these morphemes are a) word-educational suffixes -ful (beautiful), -al (economical), -ic (historic); 2) inflectional suffixes -er and -est (bigger, biggest); or, analytically, a combination with amplifying particles more and most arising from the comparative and superlative degree of the Old English adjective micel (mōra - mæst), which forms the periphery for the English language in the taxonomy of attribute complexes. Given the functional potential, these units fall into attributive and predicative ones, in which, however, the categorizing noema “quality” is not completely leveled, but takes the form of an immanent attributeness to a subject or phenomenon, a certain static sign. In the German language, the morphological formants of the noema “quality” appear in the correlated form in the attribute groups: altes Buch , alte Bücher . There are also word-building affixes for the verbalization of “quality”: suffixes -ig, -en, -lich, -em; prefixes -ge, -be, -ent, etc.; thus, accordingly, the material severity of the correlations of "qualities" in the attributive group is more pronounced.

Such facts of the presence of formal morphological indicators in the inflected languages forced researchers to search for grammatically formed indicators (affixal methods) of verbalization of the categorizing noema "quality" in agglutinative languages as well. This tendency was observed during the creation of grammars of oral minority languages in the USSR during the language construction period. However, these attempts were initially doomed to failure due to the lack of differential signs of delimitation of attributive units into a separate part-of-class class in such languages recently put into writing (Karachay-Balkar). Here, the noema “quality” cannot be differentiated from the described item or phenomenon, and yet the same root morpheme has the potential to update the noema “quality” in other formally distinguished parts of speech (noun, verb) without a morphological marker, for example: In Kazakh жас meansyoung, at the same time, the overtones of qualitative characteristics can be contaminated in different parts of speech: In Kazakh эдеми means beautiful. In the pure agglutinative Karachay-Balkarian language system, the suffixed “forms ending in -гьан/-ген , grammatically representing participles, often have the meanings of nouns and adjectives: in Karachay-Balkar биш ген means hard boiled , but биш ген алма meand ripe apple , ауру гъан means diseased , but ауру гьан нъа къараргъа means to take care of diseased ” (Gochiyaeva & Suyunchev, 1989, p. 722). Agglutinative with a predominantly synthetic expression of grammatical meanings, the Japanese language is one of the most interesting in terms of updating the categorizing noema “quality” morphologically; first, as we have said, due to the presence of additional overtones of the semantic construction in the “quality” units (conditional, probabilistic, connective, etc.); secondly, due to the presence in the changeable paradigmatics of different parts of speech, the implementers of the basic conditions of “generating meaning in textual reality and relating it to objective reality” “constants of situationality, subjectivity, modality and intentionality” (Bredikhin, 2015, p. 25), expressed using formal affixes. For instance: in Japanese ビールを飲ま ない 人 (bi: ru-o noma nai hito) means a person not drinking beer (from verb 飲む ( nomu ) meaning to drink , using the negative form -ない ( -nai ) as an attribute function), or an expression of inner desire to any action noema "state" in the verb form of the action: in Japanese 飲 み た い ( nomi tai ) means I want to drink (from verb む ( nomu ) meaning to drink with the suffix -たい (-tai).

Thus, it can be concluded that the formal indicators that are representative of the categorizing noema “quality” are inseparably coexist in different lexical-grammatical and lexical-semantic classes, while specific affixes of the “adjective” that are familiar to the native speaker of an inflectional language are distinguished ​with certain efforts and with the prior adoption of a set of conditions and assumptions and the most often they simply do not exist. The noema “quality” is included in such a case as a structural component either in the fixed semantics of tokens, or in the formal indicators of other relations. Only the functional load and position in a statement give us the right to hypothetically relate such units to the phenomena similar to the European adjectives.

As we mentioned above, the unconditional linguistic universal is the modal noema “estimate”, inherently bound with the noema “quality”. Moreover, according to a number of researchers, the basis for the verbalization of the noema “estimate” is also the constant of subjectivity. Indeed, Wolf (2002) speaks of the subjectivity as the basis of estimation. But in the categorizing noemata, the subjective and objective origins must merge together, because the perceptual and cognitive methods of forming the cognitive attribution model also act together. However, the division of primarily adjectives into objective and subjective ones as the verbalizers of the category "quality" is still used. It was Kerbrat- Orecchioni (1980) who proposed this division. The class of subjective, explicative estimation and updating noema "positive" / "negative" is divided into evaluative and affective ones, which further differentiates the constants of subjectivity and modality (the expression of evaluation as a category conceived at the level of phenomenological (conscious and directed) reflection, expression of affect as a category in noematic (intuitive) reflection.

It would seem that in a perceptual-cognizable and categorizable concept there should be pure “objectivity”, with “subjectivity” in an aperceptive assessment. However, there are many controversial points in such an explanation, because in the estimation process, for example, comparison of a certain larger object with a smaller one, or brighter object with less bright one, the comparison itself is carried out by a man, and therefore subjective by nature.

In the process of text-generation, new overtones are involved in the verbalization of the categorizing noema “quality”, “these metaphrases can change and most often undergo a transformation of diffraction and modification” (Bredikhin & Sidorenko, 2015, para. 7), these are the connotations "quality" and "relativity" in the process of metaphorization and metonimization. For example, with the metaphorical use of the relative attribute “wooden” in relation to a person, the connotation attribute “relativity” is leveled and the transformation of diffraction reveals the metaphorical “quality” of the described person. We observe the same principles in the English language system: in English hard surface, hard rock / hard life. These processes are the result of sociologization in the reflection of the objective reality in the description, ethical and aesthetic norms that occur in a certain linguistic culture. The implementation of diffraction, as a rule, occurs in the direction from the perceptual to the apperceptive on the beam of phenomenological reflection and is universal in all languages.

Conclusion

Thus, we can conclude about the close inseparable relationship of all the above aspects of the noematics of attributive complexes. The noematic structure of the class of language units with the categorizing noema “quality” is a non-countable, elementary set of noematic components, while their syncretic inseparable unity, where each structural component has a not rigidly fixed place, but is a dynamic unit of a mobile constantly transforming structure.

The categorizing noema"quality" is present in the structure of the generalized meaning of all attribute constructs in the studied language systems, i.e. manifests itself as universal one; however, it is updated in different ways. In inflected languages, the most productive way of its representation is adjectivization as a way of verbalizing the quality of an object or phenomenon at the grammatical level, manifested separately. It should be noted that transformations of the morphological structure in languages prone to analytics, for example, the loss of inflections in English, do not significantly change the underlying grammatical differentiation of linguistic units. In agglutinative languages, the “homonymicity” of the noematic representativeness of qualitativeness (belonging of attributes to different parts of speech: participle, adjective, noun, adverb) is a consistently realized attribute. While the relative differences of parts of speech in such languages are not formally demonstrated in these language systems. The updating of the categorizing noema “quality” and its external and interal representations in the languages of the incorporating order provide ample opportunities for research and application of the hermeneutic-noematic analysis.

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