Cognitive Research Methods in Linguistics: Conceptual-Inferential Analysis

Abstract

In studying language modern linguistics takes into account the users’ personality and their role as interpreters, arguing that language does not only convey a person’s knowledge of the world in one format or another, but also interprets it in a certain way. The leading role of the anthropocentric factor in linguistic research, as well as focusing on the cognitive and linguistic mechanisms of meaning construction makes the problem be discussed in the study up-to-date and significant one within the framework of the cognitive-discursive paradigm. The authors put forward an idea of conceptualinferential analysis as a new research method which can be effectively applied to language data within the framework of a cognitive study of language. The aim of this article is to substantiate the possibility of using this method in modelling the processes of interpretation and representation of world knowledge in language. The application of the method of conceptual-inferential analysis is illustrated by the example of quantitative interpretation of quality in language as a complex mental processing of quantitative-qualitative relations in the world. Based on the analysis of the linguistic means of the quantity concept representation, the article gives a deeper insight into processes of quantitative interpretation of quality, describes the repertoire of potential inferenced qualitative meanings and demonstrates their dependence on the cognitive context. In addition to the proposed method, the authors also use other research methods and techniques of conceptual analysis and conceptual-definition analysis. The evidence data (12000 examples) is retrieved from the works by modern authors. The integrated application of conceptual-inferential and conceptual-definition analysis methods reveals a high interpretive potential of quantitative meanings in representing quality in language. It also helps identify cognitive mechanisms of the quantitative-qualitative meanings construction, and to detect various types of knowledge available to an individual as an interpreter of quantitative-qualitative relations and their representation in language.

Keywords

• conceptual-definitional analysis
• interpretation
• inference
• knowledge
• quantity
• quality