The Axiological Profile of the Aesthetic-Cosmological Domain of Evaluation in Old English

The article reconstructs the axiological profile of the aesthetic-cosmological domain of evaluation in Old English texts (7th–11th centuries) and explains its distinctive features. The domain is treated not as a theme or a stylistic genre but as a field of experience, an environment in which a language community regularly assigns a particular value profile to what is evaluated. The material comprises 283 positive and only 2 negative contexts of the aesthetic-cosmological domain, established within an author-compiled corpus of 2,953 contexts of 76 evaluative adjectives from 285 Old English texts; value concepts were attributed based on three independent principles: the dictionary profile, the etymology, and the collocational frame. Then they were classified according to the ten basic values of S. Schwartz (Tradition (TRAD), Power (POW), Achievement (ACH), Hedonism (HED), Self-Direction (S-D), Stimulation (STIM), Security (SEC), Conformity (CONF), Benevolence (BEN), and Universalism (UNIV)), with the dependence of their distribution on the domain tested by Pearson’s χ2 and Haberman’s residuals. It is established that the domain displays the highest polar asymmetry in the corpus and possesses no systematic negative pole: beauty, light, and the order of the world are conceptualised as a self- evident good. Its core value concepts are Hedonism (28.6%; z = +20.18) and Stimulation (27.5%; z = +23.29), as sensory pleasure and radiance, followed by Universalism (27.5%; z = +10.72) as a background value of cosmic order and Power (14.6%) represented secondarily, as the grandeur of the cosmos. The domain is lexicalised above all by adjectives beorht (radiant), fæger (beautiful (abstract)), and wlitig (beautiful (concrete/sensory)), which remain sensory-aesthetic rather than ethical in this period. It is argued that beauty has a double nature of sensory pleasure (HED/STIM) and of ordered creation (UNIV), so that aesthetic perception is at once enjoyment and cosmological cognition. Compared to the religious and gnomic domains, the aesthetic-cosmological one possesses an exclusively positive pole of the axiological typology of Old English.