On the Systemological Adequacy of a Cognitive Approach to Language

The study deals with systemological foundations underlying a cognitive-discursive approach to language that contributes to the heuristic value of linguocognitology for a deeper comprehension of the language systemic nature. The exploratory interest in this problem is stimulated by the relevance of a full-fledged and adequate description of language's essential properties, which can be achieved in compliance with the general scientific tools of the systems theory. System analysis has acquired a wide applicative potential and has now confirmed its explanatory validity due to the discovery of isomorphic characteristics of natural, humanitarian and social sciences in the second half of the 20th century. The focus is placed on the ontological aspect in the interpretation of systematicity, aimed at uncovering consistent patterns in organizing the unity of natural language, related to identification lines of multilateral and causal relationships of its composition, structure and functions. From this viewpoint, the article considers system characteristics, such as functionality, emergence, polymorphism and some others, which have been developed in the framework of linguocognitive conceptions about the thought-language interaction. The analysis involves the maxims of the systems existence that specify lexical phenomena in the close connection between language and cognition. The research is carried out on the material of theoretical and methodological principles of the cognitive-discursive paradigm in linguistics, which are presented in Russian and foreign works. A special attention is paid to concept-oriented knowledge of the word and its practical application to the study of language facts. The selection, comparison and systemology identification of the material were made using the descriptive research method implemented by actions of observation; comparison, generalization, and interpretation, respectively. The descriptive method was supplemented with elements of lexical units' conceptual analysis when it came to selecting and presenting illustrations. According to the aim, at all stages of the examination, a combination of deduction, system and axiomatic methods is used. The results of the analysis have revealed the mutual congruence of the systemological and linguistic-cognitive principles and thus have allowed to discover a clearly systemic character of scientific inquiry realized by linguocognitology. Its background is ontologically commeasurable choice of the backbone, mental, factor of linguistic unity with consideration of language among cognitive abilities. The allowance for the environment of the language system “habitation” promotes finding new and productive rethinking of already known phenomena and features of the language from the perspective of thought-language interaction, a leading quality which determines the ways of their formation and functioning in the open system. This shift in research emphasis creates a ground for overcoming the limitations of narrow empiricism and the dominant structuralism of pre-anthropocentric linguistics in the historical movement of cognition from the substantial stage through the structural to the holistic-system approach.

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