What Can One See if One Brings the Linguistic Concept Into a Panchronic View?

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This paper takes a panchronic perspective to show that the evolution of a linguistic concept in a worldview embraces this concept’s diachronic depth and this concept’s diachronic variation. The diachronic depth of a concept is an archaic image (modal mental representation) that was prerequisite for this concept (amodal mental representation) to emerge; this image had formed perceptually in the human mind, through the direct visual experience humans had in perceiving the world, which accounts for this concept’s embodiment. Mental image at this concept’s diachronic depth and embodiment of this concept are the two facts that this paper assumes one can see when viewing this concept panchronically. This paper treats panchrony as the combination of diachrony of language with universal processes of human cognition, and suggests that the panchronic mechanism behind linguistic semiosis is the modal-to-amodal conversion that takes place in the human mind and has the inner form of the word as its panchronic product and the image-driven interpretation of the word as its emergent product. This mechanism operates at each stage in language evolution, determines the genesis of the word as that of a sign-symbol, and is universal for the speakers of language by virtue of their embodiment. This paper’s theoretical commitments find application in the case of SIN in the English worldview: archaic image at SIN’s diachronic depth is reconstructed using methodologies of etymological research, as the inner form of the word sin in English; SIN’s content in diachronic variation is reconstructed using methodologies of cognitive linguistic research.