Actualizing the Interpretative Potential of Proper and Common Nouns in Receptive Discourse

Proper and common nouns unfold their discursive qualities in the discourse of the interpreter, i.e., the receiver of the message. Interpretive linguistics casts light upon the receptive speech and the interpretative potential of those lexical units that it actualizes. As the focus shifts from nouns as a grammatical class of words or communication means to nouns as objects of speech-thinking interpretation, the discursive characteristics of proper and common nouns manifest as activators of the receiver's dialogical discourse. In this regard, proper and common names actualize various cognitive models as ways of objectifying the discursive semantics of nouns in the interpretative activity of the message receiver. In a discursive experiment, respondents were asked to finish a sentence in a dialogue, where proper and common nouns actualized the dialogical discourse. Based on 486 reactions, both proper and common nouns proved able to deploy the communicative discourse, but in a different way. As the interpretation process unfolded, proper and common nouns activated different areas of cognitive activity. Completing a dialogue with a common noun activated the cognitive areas associated with background knowledge, events, and evaluation, but the area of attribution remained uninvolved. When the dialogue was completed with a proper name, it activated the areas of background knowledge, events, evaluation, and attribution. The formation and actualization mechanism associated with onyms were practically identical to the communicative fragments actualized by common nouns.