Emotions and Consciousness: Reconstructing Emotion Concepts’ Diachronic Depths with the Use of Proto-Language Data
Emotions and Consciousness: Reconstructing Emotion Concepts’ Diachronic Depths with the Use of Proto-Language Data

Summary/Abstract: This paper takes an embodied perspective on cognition to individuate emotion concepts in terms of diachronic-panchronic structures of human consciousness, in virtue of these concepts’ diachronic depths and of the panchronic properties of the words that name these concepts in language, presuming a relationship between proto-language meanings and forms, on the one hand, and their modern condition, on the other. Diachronic depths of FEAR, SADNESS, HAPPINESS, and SERENITY are exposed in this paper via a diachronic semantic reconstruction of the words that name these concepts in English and in Ukrainian. Archaic images of movement, and of absence of movement, are shown to form the concepts’ diachronic depths in the English and in the Ukrainian worldviews. Image-bearing basis in the ontological knowledge about fear, sadness, happiness, and serenity is proven different in these worldviews.

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