Minimal semantic description of meaning in relation to abstract vocabulary using the example of the German lexeme „Rechtsstaat“

Abstract

The research aims to address the issue of identifying hidden meanings of an abstract lexeme and representing them using the descriptive method of generative lexicon. The scientific novelty lies in developing a cognitive modeling experience of legal vocabulary through connotative meanings, where for the first time, J. Pustejovsky’s method of qualia structure analysis is applied to investigate the deep semantic structure of an abstract lexeme and its semantic variability. Through theoretical research, the importance of context, pragmatics, and syntax is demonstrated, highlighting the insignificance of characteristics such as abstractness and concreteness for describing the semantic structure of lexemes. The interdisciplinary nature of the research provides a key to connotative semantics, complementing the range of meanings with contextual senses. The identified zones of meanings are characterized as nuclear, circumnuclear, and peripheral depending on the degree of expression of these meanings: some are common and most frequent, while others are not present in all dictionary definitions or present only in specific contextual examples. The research findings amount to the discovery of the semantic features of varying expression levels in the German lexeme „Rechtsstaat“, among which the profound significant meaning of “justice” may be lost due to ethnopsychological factors of perception.