Abstract
Banking on intrinsic generative assumptions of cognitive semantics, this paper is a humble attempt that specifically sheds light on some major aspects of overtly intricate yet covertly systematic interaction that steers our conceptual processing of inherent semantic and pragmatic changes. The basic premises of such cognitive operations stem from yet may exceed the limitations of Elizabeth Traugott’s and Eve Sweetser’s historical pragmatic approach that elaborately envisages such lexical changes as meaning relations with their metaphorically polysemous progress in light of relevant epistemic constraints that can help us decode ambiguous components of some functional and lexical categories. Therefore, this paper examines in principle how schematic lexical meaning can be cross-linguistically and cross-culturally traced, handled and perceived in order to cater for an optimal matrix and some rule-governed clues and rules that may explain the internal universal design and flow of semanticity and pragmaticity in charge of such linguistic behavior. The data this study exploits and explores draw on some English and Arabic representative examples that can satisfactorily exhibit an interesting well-established cognitive mechanism that can reveal the role of Homo sapiens’ encyclopedic and collective faculty vis-à-vis such word processing; the data primarily encompass the English words silly , simple , innocent and naïve as well as their Arabic counterparts.
Highlights
English EvidenceThe four adjectives in question “silly, simple, naïve and innocent” have manifested and developed substantial degrees of similarity in their lexical meaning and their pejorative associations in modern English, though their origin proves to be different in their real world meanings
Banking on intrinsic generative assumptions of cognitive semantics, this paper is a humble attempt that sheds light on some major aspects of overtly intricate yet covertly systematic interaction that steers our conceptual processing of inherent semantic and pragmatic changes
Even many cases of borrowing would have been widely accepted without the existence of strong evidence that cross-linguistic cognitive behavior can mutually operate and generate such multisemic lexical and multi-faceted phrasal choices that have undergone the influence of apparent semantic and pragmatic waves of change that can mount to a tsunami
Summary
The four adjectives in question “silly, simple, naïve and innocent” have manifested and developed substantial degrees of similarity in their lexical meaning and their pejorative associations in modern English, though their origin proves to be different in their real world meanings. The etymology of the word naïve is French, and it is the feminine of naïf which is apparently a descendant from Old French inborn or natural that came from Latin natives, i.e. native It seems predictable from the previous analyses of simple that humans tend to associate natural and unaffected things with pejorative connotations as if evil, artificial and sophisticated were the rule and the criterion according to which intelligence is measured. The mapping of human lacking of experience, expertise and experimentation overlaps with applying the word ‘naïve’ to animals in scientific contexts as in ‘naïve rats’ which does not mean innocent, simple nor silly; rather it describes rats subjected to experimentation for the first time This can be closely associated with a primary feature that ‘naïve people’ exhibit, i.e. having a particular experience for the first time too, which is often times deemed insufficient. All these peripheral meanings are still concomitant in use along with the central meaning of the original word itself
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