The Figurative History of Money: Cognitive Foundations of Money Names in Anglo-Saxon

Abstract

The current research is the first in a series of articles devoted to the money names in difefrent periods of the English language history and is an attempt to reconstruct cognitive foundations for designating the concept of money in the Anglo-Saxon period (AD 410 -- 1066) and look at how specific historical processes and human practices might have affected the naming.Money as an object of cognition is a prepogative of economics, and as artifacts of numismatics. Linguistics is yet to contribute to the study of the phenomenon in questionas its methods of semantic, etymological, and comparative analyses can help expose sociolinguistic forces at work in setting consistent patterns for denotation. In the history of concept formation figurative transfers played an important role in creating grounds for naming an object by the cognizing subject. Thus, onomasiology draws on cognitive schemes and image-schemata as its foundational elements. The aim of this article is to induce these elements. Diachronic cognitive onomasiology and social cognitive linguistics provide cross-disciplinary frameworks for the research.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.sal.0.30.17311