The Name of Action

About the author:

Abstract:

Having singled out the conceptual opposites “Man of Thought” and “Man of Action” from the episteme of the Elizabethan Renaissance, the author scrutinizes one of these opposites to clarify the meanings and values that Shakespeare ascribed to the conceptual entities the “name of action” and “man of action”.

This research centers on two semantic components of these entities: homo ludens (through analysis of the comedy “As You Like It”) and Man of Venture (through analysis of lexical contexts from the Shakespearean corpus). Conceptual, epistemological, and contextual analyses of the lexemes from the semantic field “economic activity” reveal that the Shakespearean notion “The Name of Action” manifests itself within the scope of the syncretic domain “Man of Action + Love = The Good”. A semiolinguistic approach based upon semantic and pragmatic analyses of the linguistic sign “The Name of Action” enables the author to understand how the complementarity principle works when new meanings of lexemes appear as a result of lexis transmission from the semantic cluster “economic activity” into other clusters denoting human actions. The corpora approach enables to trace symmetric “mirror” contexts of the conceptual opposites “Man of Thought / Man of Action” throughout the Shakespearean corpus, which proves that they were written by the author who considered the Name of Action to be the major epistemic value.

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