Understanding and evaluation: A cross-linguistic study of the evaluative collocates of English and Armenian verbs of understanding

Yelena Yerznkyan

Yerevan State University, Armenia

Prof. Dr. Yelena Yerznkyan is the head of the Chair of the English Language, Yerevan State University (Armenia). She has extensive experience in teaching undergraduate and postgraduate courses in linguistics and ESP/EAP. She is the author of highly ranked monographs in pragmasemantics and cognitive linguistics, Armenian-English, English-Armenian extended dictionaries and more than 180 academic papers. Her teaching and research areas include cognitive linguistics, semantics, pragmatics, lexicology and lexicography, critical discourse analysis, multimodality, metaphor theory, methods of teaching ESL/ESP/EAP, as well as testing and assessment.

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3930-6176

Diana Movsisyan

Armenian State University of Economics, Armenia

Diana Movsisyan holds a PhD in Philology. She obtained her PhD from Yerevan State University, Armenia. She is a senior lecturer at the Chair of Languages, Armenian State University of Economics. The scope of her academic interests includes semantics, pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, metaphor theory and corpus linguistics.

https://orcid.org/0009-0005-1606-9365

Abstract

The paper studies the correlation between understanding and evaluation in the light of social interactions, and aims at exploring the metaphorical mapping of the process of understanding in the English and Armenian languages. The purpose of the paper is to analyze the two cognitive processes, based on the contrastive study of verbs of understanding in terms of the evaluative meaning of their collocates, thus explaining the dynamics of understanding-evaluation relations, fully manifested in the metaphorical patterns underlying the sense of the verb.  It is shown that the evaluative meaning of the collocates plays a pivotal role in shaping how understanding is emotionally and rationally assessed. A corpus driven analysis of the English and Armenian factual material reveals the collocations that metaphorically confer different dimensions to the process of understanding and points out a clear tendency to mark understanding as positive when evaluated rationally and negative when evaluated emotionally. The research detects and determines three types of evaluation in the axiological system under study and classifies them as emotional, rational or orientational. Their relative positioning on the axiological scale correlates with the accepted norm viewed as the deictic centre (reference point) of the whole process. The main findings of the research make a novel contribution to the study of understanding-evaluation correlation, offering insights into the metaphorical nature of how understanding is perceived and evaluated in both English and Armenian. 

Keywords:

verbs of understanding, cognitive metaphor, deixis, norm, emotional evaluation, rational evaluation, orientational evaluation