GRAMMATICAL SCHEMAS OF SECONDARY LINGUISTIC INTERPRETATION

Abstract

The author analyses grammatical forms of linguistic cognition which are used for primary and secondary interpretation of the world in the process of its mental construal in language, i.e. cognitive schemas of direct interpretation of variety of objects, events and of their characteristics as they are perceived in the world around (primary interpretation), on the one hand, and those of interpretation of previously gained and verbalized conventional knowledge about the world, on the other. He argues that structuring world and world knowledge in the processes of conceptualization and categorization is always interpretative and follows some general, or conventional, and specific, or individual, cognitive schemas. This argument is derived from the author-suggested three-member pattern of language functions, claiming ‘the interpretive function’ to be a basic one along with the cognitive and communicative functions. It is the interpretive function of language that requires a broad choice of schemas to structure the world and the world knowledge and to trigger basic processes of linguistic interpretation. Among the conventional grammatical schemas employed in these processes are certain types of concepts and categories, propositional, metaphoric, and metonymic models represented by different types of syntactic structures, simple or complex, as well as the structure of various types of texts. Individually specific can be human particular systems of conceptualization and categorization, complex propositions, newly-construed metaphors, and modified conventional schemas which are specifically represented in language.