Abstract :
[en] In this lecture, I will present my ongoing research about cognition verbs in Ancient Egyptian.
The main objectives of this study are organized in two parts: 1) the collection of verbs and compound expression based on verbs related to cognition in Ancient Egyptian (with a focus on Late Egyptian), followed with the definition and description of each lexical unit’s semantics; 2) the onomasiology work, which will aim to describe the links between the various verbs and compound expressions studied within the cognition domain.
The basic subdivisions proposed by Fortescue (2001) are used as the main framework for it has been tested on a large corpus of 73 languages. On the basis of these data, according to Fortescue, five subdomains linked to five pivot-concepts (François 2008) appear to consistently emerge cross-linguistically. This means that they all have at least one lexical unit expressing this pivot-concept. These subdomains are KNOWING, UNDERSTANDING, INTENDING, REMEMBERING, and THINKING. Fortescue’s five categories can be further subdivided in more specific types of knowledge and thinking processes. For that purpose, the theory for teaching and learning developed by Anderson and Krathwohl (2001) and based on a former categorization by Bloom (1956) was used. In complement to these categories and subcategories, I propose here to retain a sixth one, ATTENTION. The notion of ATTENTION has been the object of many definition in cognitive psychology, neuroscience and even, more recently, machine learning.
The project offers an open door toward semantic typology since it described the structure and extent of a major conceptual domain in Ancient Egyptian and makes these data available for comparison with other languages.
The theoretical frame includes a strong anchorage in the conceptual metaphor theory and my first results reveal numerous points of contact between COGNITION and other domains such as ACTION/INTERACTION, MOVEMENT, PERCEPTION.
In particular, the study highlights many cases of metaphor-induced colexification (= linking of two senses by a single lexeme in synchrony or diachrony) and identifies the source domains of cognition expression. This component of the project will be developed in more details during the presentation. I will also address the inherent relation between semantic evolution dynamics and semantic classification strategies.
