ANTHROPOCENTRIC COMBINATORIAL-SEMANTIC REPRESENTATIONS (BASED ON OLDER SCOTTISH TEXTS)

Abstract

A significant aspect of social mapping roots in a description of personality. The most stable characteristics are supposed to be found in the oldest, i.e. according to Osgood, the most frequent collocations. The electronic resource of the Dictionary of Older Scottish Tongue, DOST, contains Scottish-literature quotations illustrating the meaning, the oldest of which are called diachronic text prototypes. For the estimation of the Older Scottish lexis, Osgood’s differential with cross-cultural universals of potency, estimation and activity ̶ Strong-Weak, Good-Bad, Active-Passive – is used, representing all the synonyms entering the language during the period 1200-1700 with the calculation of weight coefficients, treated as the membership functions in potency, estimation and activity concepts. The adjective-verbalizers of the universals are collocated with nouns and pronouns in the mentioned diachronic text prototypes, which helps to construct the logical expressions following the fuzzy techniques of ‘computing with words’. A set of such mental representations of the anthropocentric orientation makes up a thesaurus of the speech personality of the Older Scotchman. The mental portraits of he, kid, man, men, freke «brave man», renk «warrior», woman, king, prince, lord, nobleman, horsman «horseman», child, boy, son, las «girl», person, body, statur «stature», voice, apperance «appearance», stuf «stuff», folk «people», Ȝow «you» have been construed. The fluctuations on the scales of potency Strong-Weak and estimation Good-Bad as well as a regular prevalence of activity on the scale of Active-Passive are observed. The insensitivity of Older Scottish concepts to the synonyms with lateral meanings, neologisms, stylistic synonyms, i.e. their low prototypicality on the universality scales is revealed. The tendency of the scales to completion with neutral neologisms at the end of the targeted word-formation period has been noticed.