IDENTIFICATION MODUS OF THE ENGLISH-LANGUAGE ETHICAL CATEGORY GOOD

Abstract

The article highlights the identification modus of the English-language category GOOD, which is a fundamental constituent of the conceptual construal of the world. The purpose of the study is to establish the categorical and conceptual domains that constitute the identification modus of the category GOOD. The analyzed category is considered as a complete mental construct, which includes three modus: logical, identification and structural. The focus of the study is put on the identification mode, which objectifies its essence and represents how it is viewed in the conceptual sphere and conceptualized by human thinking. The material of the study is the lexicographic definitions of the representative lexemes good, goodness, data from the English language database WordNet 3.1, and contextual fragments from the iWeb English language corpus, obtained by the continuous sampling method, generated by the queries good / goodness is + N; N + is good / goodness. It is emphasized that the category is rigidly structured by the idealized cognitive models that represent its prototype and are expressed at the linguistic level by the semantics of its verbalizers. Such models act as a way of organizing knowledge about an object or phenomenon of the surrounding reality and are represented by the underlying prototype. The conducted analysis made it possible to identify three such models “moral soundness”, “usefulness & desirability” and “commodity”, each of which is discussed separately. It is noted that the idealized cognitive model is represented by two aspects: classification and characterization. The classification aspect represents a classification grid, in the nodes of which there are domains that act as superordinate concepts of the studied category. The characteristic aspect represents the semantic filling of the grid with features that form a categorical semantic prototype. The features of the categorical prototype act as a certain reference frame when categorizing objects and phenomena of the objective reality in relation to domains of a more general order, which constitute the classification aspect of each of the idealized cognitive models. The results of the study prove that the conceptualization of the abstract idea of good is based on knowledge about material physical goods.