OLEKSANDR POTEBNIA’S IDEA OF AN INTERNAL FORM OF A WORD AND SEMANTICS OF FORM OF CHINESE CHARACTERS

Abstract

The article deals with the meaning of morpheme and based on the Chinese characters, because these written signs correspond with a morpheme and objectify its meaning in their form by graphical means. It is revealed in the article through the analysis of some character’s form, that the meaning of morpheme associates in some way with the term «an internal form of a word», formulated by O. Potebnja, but with differences between two communicational channels taking into consideration – audio one, that Potebnja referred to, and visual one, that Chinese characters based on. It was shown in the article, that any Chinese character by its form is a scheme, representing some attributes of a correspondent object, and these attributes must have a diagnostic meaning and be “necessary minimum” for recognizing the object. It is argued than, that this scheme objectifies a mental mechanism of abstracting and “sorting” the attributes of an object, that’s why it can be associated with the term “an internal form of a word”, which also point out an attribute in an image of an object, though formulated for the sound signals, as these signals also objectify a mental mechanism of abstraction, but by means of the audio channel of communication. This channel conveys information successively, that’s why only one attribute can be stressed by the internal form of the word at once, while visual channel of communication can deal with information in parallel, so visual version of that form can stress more then one attribute at once. And these attributes are not represented as an open list, but as an image, closed in its form, that’s why it is stated in the article, that the internal form of a word corresponds with impression in our mind, not with notion. The same is the situation with one attribute, which serves as a basis for sound signals to form a root morpheme. That’s why it is proposed in the article to define the internal form of a word as one attribute, stressed in an image of an object (or one set of attributes, «chained» in an independent whole), and creating a possibility for a thought to abstract from a form of this object. At the same time, this meaning should be characterized as diffuse one, because information included in it, was not categorized. Except this, it is stated in the article, that from cognitive point of view, an image is a configuration of attributes, and a notion is a list of attributes.