The study of lexical concepts as content-bearing mental structures from a diachronic perspective

Abstract

The paper continues a series of works dedicated to the study of lexical concepts Zapad in Russian, West in English and 㾯 in Chinese languages as content-bearing mental structures in diachronic perspective. Since interdisciplinary research has been one of the main trends in cognitive linguistics these days, understanding of how various mental structures mediate real-world information to our mind is still a burning issue. It’s very well known that lexical meanings are constructed based on schematic mental spaces and can be considered as highly dynamic systems. However, as far as the system of spatial reasoning is claimed to be inherent and, hence, stable, the question of its conceptual structure’s inner dynamics appears to be one of the most challenging. Thus, diachronic perspective on concepts that embody the knowledge of cardinal points appears to be a promising technique to better understand the relations between different types of cognitive structures verbalized by the means of language and how original spatial knowledge is connected to more recent non- spatial knowledge in a conceptual content system. The author focuses on the role of extra-linguistic factors in conceptual knowledge formation on different stages of conceptual development.

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