The functional model of the evaluative meaning development and its peculiarities

The article describes one of the models of evaluative meaning development - the functional model. The object of research is binary oppositions: pairs of opposite concepts reflecting objective reality phenomena, their parameters and properties, and used as a metaphor by a language community to evaluate non-physical spheres of human activity. Based on the data of Russian explanatory dictionaries and texts containing language units of the opposition from the Russian National Corpus, the author describes the features of the functional model on the example of three functional binary oppositions: 'deep - shallow', 'sharp - blunt', 'full - empty'. In these oppositions, functionality has a different value content and directs the development of evaluative semantics in different ways. So, for the first opposition the functional use of the shape of the object container is important in evaluation. Combining with lexemes that indicate "results", "products", "processes", "subjects" and "tools" of cognitive activity, language units of the opposition help to "shape" the phenomenon of the mentally perceived epistemological sphere and express the fixed representations of them as containers: the deeper they are, the more cognitive information they contain and the more valuable they are. For the opposition 'sharp -blunt', the functional success of the tool-object and the reaction of the subject who perceives the action of the tool are essential in the development of evaluative semantics. Components describing the general prototypical situation reflect its evaluated activity differently. 'Sharp' emphasizes the functional success and (or) the reaction of the perceiving person, and 'blunt' characterizes either the subject in terms of a person perceiving their actions or the state of the subject as limiting their functionality from their personal point of view. The metaphorical development of opposition 'full - empty' is determined by the functional suitability / unsuitability of the container object and the reaction of the subject who perceives the rationality of using containers. Components of the opposition play different "value" role in the representation of the prototypical situation - the container and its contents: the first component is a neutral "conductor" of content enhancing its value; the second component indicates the functional unsuitability of a container and is an evaluative marker. Analysis of linguistic units compatibility within oppositions showed that despite the fact that they (oppositions) have a different perceptive nature, they reflect a similar mechanism of evaluative conceptualization. Their meanings represent long-held ideas on what kind of mentally comprehended objects can be "objectivized" by the functional features the oppositions are based on, and what information about the prototypical situation these features transfer to the objects.

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