Verbalization of imaginative and mental activity as a component of children’s linguistic worldview

This study is devoted to the analysis of the naive and imitative worldview components’ implementation mechanisms in the process of imaginative and mental activity verbalization in primary school age. The aim of this paper is to establish inextricable dichotomy in the metaphorical explication of the subject and metaphorically centric bases in the imitative schemes of utterance production about mental activity by primary school children. The complex methodology of description includes techniques of component, contextual and semantic analysis, as well as a method of cognitive mapping based on the presence/absence of concepts about certain semantemes in the linguistic consciousness. The paper uses a comparative analysis of the Russian language worldview and children’s individual worldview based on syntactic structures representing the understanding of figurative and mental activity by a child. As a result, implementation aspects of practice-centered and imaginative mental activity rethinking are delimited into naive ones as determined by personal components (episodics, emotions and feelings) and imitative (as a collective space of norms, values, knowledge). At the same time, as the first (linguistic worldview) grows out of the second (private perception systems), so both groups of the components under consideration participate in the separate fragments of the children’s linguistic worldview formation on a common basis, determining the area of metaphorization – 1) figurative precedent or 2) subject situational. During the analysis core universal syntactic models of representation were identified: 1) specific mental centric, 2) non-specific situational subject centric, 3) non-specific situational metaphor centric; as well as specific, metaphorical and subject centric, characterizing the children’s worldview based on subjective opinions, assessments, values, background knowledge.