ABSTRACT
The chapter shows the perspective of the basic notions and methods of cognitive linguistics in the analysis of a specific term system—medicinal plants’ names, or phytonyms, in Romance, Germanic, and Slavic languages. The author presents different domains and schools of cognitive linguistics and in numerous examples shows how the ideas offered and developed by scholars can help explain motivational features of herbs’ designation. The results of the onomasiological and cognitive analysis show how information processing channels, such ways of information processing of metaphor and metonymy, and stages of human cognitive activity are reflected in phytonymic lexicon.
