Internal Psycholinguistic Content of Words Reflecting Moral and Ethical Norms in General Linguistics

Abstract

The article presented for discussion is devoted to a little-studied and therefore valuable, from a scientific point of view, topic. There is a large specialized literature on the various meanings of words that are objective in the theory of general linguistics. Especially in that period of development of cognitive linguistics, when numerous theoretical positions in the recent past invariably relied on a materialistic basis. On the contrary, the internal content of the subjective meaning of words was considered less. Moreover, the author of the article chooses a narrow aspect, limiting himself only to lexemes with moral content. This allows us to concretize a number of concepts introduced into scientific circulation and thereby makes the author's work meaningful. In our opinion, having carefully studied the specialized literature on this issue, we managed to draw the attention of linguists to such a phenomenon of thinking in general linguistics, which models a special worldview of a person. Hence, the author of the article correctly concludes that it is necessary to closely study the subjective meaning of a word both today and in the future, since it is recognized as a large-scale semantic unit, to a certain extent reflecting the individual view of the world. In this case, the question was posed point-blank: which research method should be put at the forefront? It seems to us that the author has found the most radical solution: to apply a comprehensive approach to developing the structure of the subjective meaning of individual words or expressions/phrases. On the one hand, it is quite obvious that any conclusions and generalizations made by the author of the article primarily meet the requirements of modern linguistics. In addition, some of the assumptions or even hypotheses are analyzed using materials on psychology. As a result, a picture emerges of the search for the necessary meanings of words precisely under a psycholinguistic bias. This, undoubtedly, enriches the work. On the other hand, the emphasis on ethical and moral qualities significantly narrows the object of research and concentrates the main meaning on this point. Finally, a certain (albeit subtle) connection with a conglomerate of related scientific disciplines is revealed, which makes it possible to expand the sought-after information, giving the subjective meaning of words a more precise interpretation. At the end of the work, brief results of the ascertaining experiment are given.

Keywords: Linguistics; Psycholinguistics, Meaning of the word; Subjectivity; Objectivity; Morality; Ethics; Justice; Norms.