The Concept of “Projection” and “Projective Meaning” in the Term System of Cognitive Linguistics

Abstract

The paper proposes a nontrivial approach to the study of the mechanism of associating meanings and words in speech, which allows us to consider not their equal connection, but the projection of the unknown and/or incomprehensible to the elements of experience – a collective, molded in usual compatibility of language units, or an individual that creates occasional compatibility. The purpose of the study is to provide a detailed theoretical justification for the use of the term “projection” in cognitive linguistics and in cognitive poetics as an emerging paradigm of knowledge about the artistic text, as well as the term “projective meaning”, which allows us to approach such traditionally distinguished paths as metaphor, comparison and metamorphosis from a single point of view. The theoretical basis of the research is the concept of grammaticality of abstract substantives with secondary predicates developed by the author, the method of modeling culturally developed and artistic ideas on the abstract phenomenon calculated in projective meanings, and the principles of linguistic modeling of the semantic structure of artistic text. The argument of the relevance of the term “projection” in linguistics is based on the scientific achievements of domestic and foreign linguists, but the historical perspective requires recognition of the priority in developing a method that later received the name “conceptual analysis of the word” for such domestic linguists as A. Bely and V. A. Uspensky. In the mathematical term “projection”, which is adopted by linguistics relevant for cognitive science, the idea of dependence of the unknown on the known in the process of its mental development, as well as the idea of the “picture plane”, which can be interpreted as applied to linguistic tasks as an object plane filled with the results of everyday experience. Projective meanings (projectives) are proposed to be considered as sensual and logical images of an abstract phenomenon, in which its meaningful cultural profiles (sides, aspects) are conceptualized and which guide the compatibility of its name, and the set of projectives is a verifiable model of the content of an abstract name. The article proposes the establishment of similarity (by projectivity) of cognitive metaphors and comparisons and their cognitive and structural differences: logical redundancy of comparison and the logical need for a cognitive metaphor for the discursive existence of abstract names. In comparison, as a kind of widely understood metaphor, there is a “form-building instinct” (O. Mandelstam), in which knowledge prevails over vision, metaphysics over physics, individual over universal.