3TREE ANATOMY AS A COGNITIVE MODEL*

The comparative study of lexical semantics reveals the existence of a variety of wide-spread conventionalized if not universal cognitive paths that contribute to a more or less loose structuring of vocabulary. The study of this structurating may shed light upon so-called naive or common sense linguistic thought. Knowledge of it would obviously make the under-standing of relations between words in the lexicon easier. The word stock of numerous languages throughout the world, just like the mythology of many peoples, bears witness to the importance of several funda-mental cognitive models for the expansion of terminologies as well as for the advancement of abstract thought. Alongside kinship (more precisely family) or-ganization, human (and to some modest extent animal) anatomy, or atmospheric phenomena, it is the tree (or plant) anatomy model that cannot be overlooked in this connexion. Tree as a cognitively useful idea has been known throughout hu-man history, as witnessed, and A. Demandt illustrates this with numerous exam-ples; Johann Gottfried Herder, Wilhelm von Humboldt, L. von Ranke, Theodor E. Mommsen and others compare mankind to a tree (Demandt 1978: 107109)