Revealing the anthropocentric nature of language and the theory of the living word in the interpretation of the concepts vidieť ‘see’, vedieť ‘know’ and veriť ‘believe’ in the Slovak language

Abstract

Abstract Our cognition, that is our knowledge of the world, is based on concepts. A word itself can be regarded as a multilayered concept with an anthropocentric proto-basis. Following the tradition and the methodological framework of the New Moscow School of Conceptual Analysis, we trace the implicit affinity between the concepts of seeing, knowing and believing in Slovak. In this paper, the lexical relations of inclusion between the concepts are revealed directly through the etymological study of the lexemes vidieť ‘see’, vedieť ‘know’ and veriť ‘believe’. Additionally, the identification of figurative meanings of the selected Slovak phrasemes provides indirect evidence for the assumed internal connections and for the existence of associative lingua-creative mechanisms manifested in the birth of new metaphorical meanings.