The evolution of the concept of ART in the English linguistic construal of the world: from CRAFT to CREATIVITY

Abstract

There are many accounts of the concept of ART that generally focus on its synchronous analysis. To date the emergence of a new research approach of historical cognitivе linguistics opens up an opportunity of rethinking the structure of this concept and its place in the English linguistic construal of the world. In this paper, we hypothesize that ART is a gestalt polyappeal concept that evolved by the type of cladogenesis from the concept of CRAFT; accordingly, its place in the English constual of the world changed from UTILITARY to AESTHETIC.With the aim to establish the evolution and place of this concept in the English linguistic construal of the world, the article identifies the means of nominating the concept in terms of diachrony; analyses the semantics of lexical means of concept representation, its structure, and determines vectors of its profiling in different historical periods. The comprehensive method of our research includes identifying the name of the concept, that includes semantic componential and frequency analysis of basic lexemes representing the concept of ART in English. As a result the authors find out the etymological layer of the concept, its etymon and internal form of the name. In this paper, we describe lexical means of representation of the concept of ART, that include such basic lexemes as art, arts, skill, and craft, and claim that the semantic volume of art predominates and includes the semantic volumes of other synonyms. Based on their comparative study, we also claim that the noun art, that dominates both in frequency and in semantic capacity, is the name of the concept of ART. Etymologically, art (n) dates back to the Proto-Indo-European noun *ar (ə) -ti- that meant ‘method of doing smth’, which determines its internal form. The empirical material of this research was obtained from thesauri and etymological dictionaries of English, and from the database BNC. We claim that the conceptual model of ART has undergone historical changes. Being based on PROFESSIONALISM within the segment HUMAN ACTIVITIES in the construal of the world, in the Middle Ages, the concept CRAFTS/ART dominated and was profiled within the domain of UTILITARY. At the beginning of the Renaissance, in the construal of the world, along with CRAFTS (the idea of ​​small-scale production) profiled against the UTILITARY, the concept of WORK (industrial production) was formed; and the concept of ART profiled within the AESTHETIC domain appeared. Today, the concept of ART is the domain for such subdomains as PAINTING, SCULPTURE, LITERATURE, THEATER, DANCE, CINEMA, and others.