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

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.