Cognitive Mechanisms of Phraseological Units Interpretive Meaning Construction in Relation to Conflict-Free Communication

Abstract

The authors examine the interpretive meanings of phraseological units from the perspective of a cognitive approach and within the framework of the linguistic interpretation theory in order to study their role in ensuring conflict-free communication in future research. The undertaken study covers the material from the Russian, English and French languages. The authors argue that the interpretive nature of phraseological units is due to the fact that their meanings convey a certain interpretation of already existing and earlier verbalized knowledge about objects and events. This interpretation takes as a basis the postulated similarity with other objects and events from the same or another conceptual domain and knowledge about them. The method of cognitive modeling applied by the authors makes it possible to determine the type of relationships between different entities, that make up a conceptual basis for phraseological meaning construction. In authors’ opinion, conflict-free verbal communication is directly related to the choice of cognitive mechanisms for the construction of meaning, transmitted by phraseological units, that prevent its misunderstanding or misinterpretation. The analysis of the language material shows that the process of phraseological interpretive meaning construction employs cognitive mechanisms of profiling, conceptual metaphor, conceptual comparison (analogy), conceptual metonymy and conceptual metaphtonymy, profiling being a universal cognitive mechanism that precedes all other cognitive operations.