NONEQUIVALENCE OFPOLYSEMANTS AND THE MECHANISM OFFORMING CO-KNOWLEDGE

Abstract

The article deals with the interlanguage nonequivalence of polysemants in the context of an unresolved issue in the formation of co-knowledge within a language community. The author justifies the necessity of rejecting the postulate of “semantic transfers” as a generative mechanism of semantics and searching for an alternate approach that allows us to see the difference between the most meaningful side of language units and the act of awareness of this content. Based on a number of concepts directly related to human cognition (the evolutionary concept of anthropogenesis, the theory of attention scheme, enactivism, the concept of “living knowledge” and model-dependent realism), this paper hypothesizes that co-knowledge about the applicability of polysemants to various situations depends on internal models created by the brain. A specific instance of the model is a complex of certain marks (the mode of defeated signals) and their interaction. The hypothesis is aimed at explaining the “unconscious mastery” of native polysemants, the “congruence” of this process within the language community and its “variability” for native speakers of different languages. The main research methods are comparative analysis and deduction. Using the example of two polysemants from Chinese and Russian, the author proves that co-knowledge is formed because when activating the same marks, people will recognize the applicability of the model to similar situations and be aware of similar semantics at the same time. The “variability” of co-knowledge is inevitable, because the model works in an ego-involved mode: the role that a person can perform during their interaction with the environment directly affects the creation of models and the act of awareness. The originality of the semantics of the two polysemants is predetermined by the fact that in the case of the Chinese polysemant, the cognitive strategy of the OBSERVER prevails, and in the case of the Russian polysemant - the strategy of the ACTOR prevails. The new approach lays the groundwork for the strategy of comparing polysemants to analyze implicit language ability as the most important component of human cognition.