The cognitive pattern ‘mental phenomena’ in the English linguoculture

The article contains the results of research on historical continuity and parallelism between concrete eidetic verbal thinking and abstract conceptual verbal thinking. We demonstrate how sensory images acquire a symbolic function, expressing abstract ideas, and how events of the inner (mental) world are modeled by using images of events of the outer (material) world. In the course of historical evolution, on its way to becoming abstract, human thinking inherited patterns developed at previous stages; new ideas concerning the world are based on old ones, used as a foundation. The cognitive basis of abstract thinking consists of sensory images. By way of illustration, we study the cognitive pattern ‘Mental Phenomena’ belonging to the English linguoculture, in which images of events occurring in the objective (material) world serve as models of events occurring in the subjective (mental) world. The results of this process are embodied in the meanings, the inner form, and the combinability of units of the English language. The examples given in the article show that the sensory substrate has deeply and organically grown into abstract thinking and latently influences it. Even scientific abstract thinking is not free from sensory visualization; the latter acts as its cognitive substrate. This visualization, which makes it possible to model objects by analogy, plays a useful role in scientific thinking. In many units of the English language having an abstract meaning and included into the semantic field ‘Mental Phenomena’, a concrete meaning may be found at some point of their semantic evolution. This is a manifestation of historical continuity and structural parallelism between concrete and abstract thinking.