Prof.  V.V.Mykhajlenko

Bukovyna State Finance Academy

M.A. O.A.Hordyeyeva

Chernivtsi National University, Ukraine

Conceptualizing Finance in Modern Anglophone Worldview

 

Cognitive anthropocentrism is a fundamental notion of “anthropological linguistics”, which  explores the limits that the specific structure of human perception imposes upon linguistic creativity. Anthropocentrism views reality relative to a person, and maintains, directly or indirectly, that a person is the measure of all things. It is based on immediacy and experience, as validated by sense-perception. Cognitive anthropocentrism is interwoven with cognitive science, as an interdisciplinary study of how information is represented and transformed in the brain. It comprises

psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience, learning sciences, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and education. Cognitive linguistics has become one of the leading branches of cognitive science. [Geeraerts,1993]

Cognitive semantics is of the subfields of cognitive linguistics, that studies language as a container and an organizer [Langacker,1991] of knowledge within the human mind. Thus it shares one basic property with pragmatics, namely, that language is not analyzed as an abstract structure but as a human quality. Semantics, as the theory of the relation between language and the world, is reformulated as cognitive semantics referring to the theory of the relation between the language and the mind's understanding of the world. It combines analysis of cognitive structure, conceptual structure and semantic structure.

The objective of the present article is to reconstruct the conceptual model of Finance in Modern Anglophone Worldview for its further verbalizing.

The basic unit of the mental model is concept. Concept as a basic theoretical construct of cognitive linguistics in conceptualization  is used to denote units of mental representation. Concepts may be verbalized, but a large amount of concepts is preserved in human mind in the form of images, pictures, schemas etc. According to E.S.Kubryakova [3,85-95] concepts should be treated as counterparts of words. The meaning of a word is a concept “bound by a sign”. Thus concepts are independent of language and only some concepts are verbalized. Cognitive linguistics opposes conceptual level with semantic one. As a rule only the most important concepts acquire their verbal form. Words, which exist in a language, show what concepts were relevant for a certain language speaking community in the process of cognizing reality.

Concept can be examined and verbalized through Conceptual analysis.

 A conceptualization or conceptual structure can be defined as an intensional semantic structure that encodes implicit knowledge constraining the structure of a part of  domain. The representation of a body of knowledge is based on the specification of conceptualization.[Evans,Bergen,Zinken,2004] A conceptualization is an abstract, simplified view of the world that we wish to represent for some purpose. Every knowledge base, knowledge-based system or agent is committed to some conceptualization, explicitly or implicitly. For these systems, what "exists" is what can be represented. When the knowledge of a domain is represented in a declarative formalism, the set of objects that can be represented is called the universe of discourse.

Conceptual analysis comes into the picture as the means of identifying the essential

beliefs. Since there must be essential beliefs, conceptual analysis must be possible.

Table ¹1: Conceptual Analysis of the concept Finance :

 

 

According to the performed analysis concept Finance builds conceptual model that encompasses 12  lexico-semantic domain constituents: investment, floatation, corporate finance, business ,funding, banking, management direction, accumulation, capital account, economics, quaestor.

Finance, though in its turn is the constituent of more generalized term Economics, that is one of it’s lexico-semantic domain constituents.

 

Table ¹2: Conceptual Analysis of the concept Economics:

 

 

 

 

 

The investigation illustrates the interdependency between two conceptual systems: Finance and Economics. As a result they are closely interlaced and are domain constituents, that build the conceptual model of Economics, as more generalized concept  and Finance as more specialized one.

 

 

 

 

 

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