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Файл:Lexicology. Practical Course. Лексикология. Практический курс. Учебное пособие
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These studies are focused on the thinking individual and model his
mental activity and its patterns based on the analysis of linguistic facts.
They proceed from the postulate that the theory of cognitive semantics
should depict what is actually “happening in our mind”. This direction is
called the cognitive theory of personality (V. Demyankov).
Research in the second direction is focused not so much on modeling
human cognitive activity and highlighting the concept as a unit of this
activity, but on analyzing the reflection in the language of the results of this
activity. The subject of this is not an individual, but a linguistic society. The
second direction can be called the social cognitive theory. A concept is
knowledge about a particular object, which is fixed in the semantics of
linguistic units and is included as a component in the linguistic worldview
of the people. The description of the concept involves the study of linguistic
semantics.
Two directions of concept research to one degree or another interact and
intersect with the linguocultural approach to the concept, where the main
attention is paid to the connection between the concept and culture, the
identification of national-specific characteristics of the concept. Cognitive
theory of personality and social cognitive theory interact. Individuals
operate with largely the same mental formations, substantially inherited
from previous generations. The results of the mental activity of a set of
individuals are fixed in the language. The difference lies in the direction of
research: in the dynamic modeling of the process of mental activity or in the
static description of the sum of the results of this activity.
4.1. CONCEPT RESEARCH METHODS
When describing the concept from the standpoint of the second
direction, we use the theory of the semantic field, where the center and the
periphery are distinguished in the concept structure. For example, the
concept of “sadness” is represented in the English language by a fairly large
number of words: sadness, unhappiness, sorrow, dejection, depression,
misery, despondency, despair, wretchedness, gloom, grief, woe, etc. The
center of the concept is formed by the meanings of the words sadness and
unhappiness, denoting the state of sadness. This is followed by words
denoting a very strong sadness and / or sadness associated with certain
reasons, which has a certain character (grief – a feeling of great sadness,
especially when somebody dies, despair – feeling of having lost all hope).
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The word woe, denoting a state of very strong sadness (a great
unhappiness), is not so often used in modern language, it is perceived as
outdated or bookish, therefore it refers to the periphery of the concept, we
also refer to the periphery, for example, the word disappointment.
Frustration is certainly related to the sadness that can be caused by it, and is
defined through the word sadness – sadness becauѕе ѕоmеthіng hаѕ nоt
happened or wasn’t as good, as you expected or hoped;the feeling of being
annoyed or less confident because you cannot achieve what you want, or
something that makes you feel like this.
However, observation of the use of this word in texts shows that
disappointment is often associated with a state of resentment, anger, while
sadness is transformed into a feeling of dissatisfaction or bad mood: He
found it difficult to hide his disappointment when she did not arrive.
To characterize the concept, the understanding of the nominative density
of the concept is also used. The nominative density of a concept is a
quantitative characteristic and reflects how many nominative units – words
or phrases – are used for its nomination. For example, the concepts
“happiness”, “sadness” are represented in the language by a large number of
words and phraseological units, whereas, e.g. the “forest” concept is less
common. The nominative density of the concept testifies to its importance
in the linguistic society. The higher it is, the more significance it has.
In the framework of the second direction the concept means everything
that is known about an object; it is the reflection in the semantics of
linguistic units not only of the essential features of an object, but also of all
knowledge about it (V.N. Telia).
So, the semantics of the complex of linguistic units forms a kind of
content space, from which the concept is modeled. When we determine this
content space, we take into account not only the meanings of linguistic
signs, but also their internal form.
For example, to describe the concept of fear, it is important not only to
take into consideration the gradation of this feeling reflected in the meaning
of words (fear – horror – alarm – anxiety), but also the fact that panic can
strike a person (panic-stricken). This sign indicates the possible strength of
the experienced feeling of fear, information about which is extracted
directly from the analysis of the entire semantics of the word. This part of
meaning reflected by the internal form correlates with the meaning
underlying the phraseological unit “to strike fear into somebody /
somebody's heart”.
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A concept can be described on the basis of the one-level units’
semantics, for example, lexical or phraseological, or it can be used to model
the concept of units of different levels. So, to describe the concept of fear,
you can turn to phraseology and consider the meaning and internal form of
these phraseological units: frіghtened / scared out of one's wits, with one's
heart in one's mouth, a bundle of nerves. Analyzing their internal form and
imagery, we will see that the language reflects the idea that intense fear can
deprive a person of mind, or that a person can be so frightened that it seems
to consist of nothing but nerves. You can analyze only literary linguistic
units, but it is necessary to involve colloquial, phraseological units and
parlance. In this case, we will include in the analysis such phraseological
units as having kittens, butterflies in the stomach, etc.
The described approach is paradigmatic, since we describe a concept
due to the analysis of a number of units representing it. A syntagmatic
approach to the concept is also possible. In this case, we describe the
concept based on the analysis of the text – on the basis of considering how
the words and phraseological units representing it are used in the text. For
example, we can find out that the concept of fear is described mainly by the
adjectives grave, mortal, groundlеѕѕ, idle, sudden, combined with the word
indescribable; unspeakable with the word horror, deep, grave; high with
the word anxiety. This makes it possible to conclude, that in the English
linguistic consciousness the feeling of anxiety is subject to a certain spatial
dimension (deep, high), and the feeling of horror cannot be described
(indescribable, unspeakable).
An important place in the description of concepts, especially
phraseological ones, is occupied by the analysis of conceptual metaphors
by which they are represented. So, for example, when implementing the
concept of fear, we use metaphors: fear is cold (make somebody's blood run
cold – make somebody very frightened; chill somebody to the bone /
marrow – to make someone feel very frightened).
The phraseological concept anger is represented by a number of
conceptual metaphors and metonymy, for example: anger is fight (jump
down somebody's throat – to react angrily to something that someone says
or does; tear a strip off somebody – to speak angrily to someone because
they have done something wrong), anger is blood (to draw blood – to make
someone very angry and upset), anger is madness (cut off your nose to upset
your face – to do something because you are angry, even if it will cause
trouble to you). Zoomorphic metaphor, which reflects the symptoms of an
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aggressive state in animals and birds, is also widespread (smooth
somebody's ruffled feathers – to try to make somebody lеѕѕ angry or upset;
set / make the fur fly – if the fur flies, people have a bad argument). The
emotion of anger is also described using a spatial metaphor. Anger is
described as going up and out (hit the ceiling / roof – to be very angry and
start ѕhоutіng). Many phraseological units representing this concept include
somatism components (names of parts of the human body): put / stick two
fingers up at somebody (to show that you are angry with somebody).
The concept appears as a combination of the set of features. When
extracting these features, especially when describing phraseological and
proverbial concepts, you can use the concept of cogniteme.
Cogniteme is a unit of knowledge that is functionally significant for
describing a fragment of worldview, a concept or a prototype. The
introduction of the concept of cogniteme is due to considerations of
convenience and rationality of description, since, when reconstructing the
worldview or a concept, it is advisable to rely on a single cognitive unit, and
not to use such diverse traditional concepts as invariant meaning, meaning
component, associative connection, etc.
For example, the analysis of proverbs representing the concept of
“danger” (No safe wading in an unknown water; There is a scorpion under
every stone; Far from home near to harm; He that would sail without
danger, must never come on the main sea; Don't go near the water until you
learn how to swim; If you play with fire you get burnt, etc.) allows you to
highlight the following cognitemes: dаngеr iѕ everywhere; unknown is
dangerous; water is dangerous; unknown water is dangerous, sea is
dangerous; love is dangerous; dаngеr must be overcome and a whole series
of more details representing the proverbial concept of danger.
Analysis of the semantic space correlated with proverbs allows us to
describe a variety of proverbial concepts: “Poverty”, “Beauty”, “Love”,
“Wife”, “Idleness”, “Talking”, “Travel”, “Cat”, “Dog”, “Bird” and many
others. It is possible to reconstruct, as an example, the concepts of color,
thereby describing the proverbial, naive idea of color.
As you can see in the examples, cogniteme is related to the units of
traditional semantics – meaning or part of it, internal form or part of it,
associative links between meaning and internal form, invariant meaning or
part of it. When considering these traditional units from the standpoint of
cognitive linguistics as carriers of some knowledge, they are “re-encoded”
into cognitemes. It is advisable to use the concept of cogniteme in the
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transition from the traditional analysis of semantics to the reconstruction of
fragments of the proverbial worldview, concepts and prototypes. The
introduction of cogniteme does not at all exclude the simultaneous use of
these traditional notions due to the proximity of the traditional approach to
the cognitive one.
It should be emphasized that the allocation of conceptual cognitemes
does not imply their strict finite number and does not mean a description in
the spirit of structuralism. As elements of the content plan, cognitemes can
overlap, intersect, differ in the degree of abstractness / concreteness, vary in
length.
Cognitemes vary in frequency. The repetition of cognitemes indicates
the importance of a particular feature for a linguistic society, since this
feature is fixed in the semantics of a linguistic sign. Frequency cognitemes
can be viewed as prototypical. The prototype includes repetitive cognitive
features, reflecting stereotyped ideas about the object, and the concept
includes all cognitive features, both repetitive and singular. The prototype is
thus the substantive core of the concept.
For instance, as a result of the analysis of English proverbs with the
mention of a horse, it turns out that prototypical signs include the following:
a horse is riding, has a saddle and a bridle, is interested in getting food (The
fault of the horse is put on the saddle; A hungry horse makes a clean
manger). If we consider the conceptual traits, that is, all the traits-
characteristics of the horse, extracted from the semantic space formed by
proverbs, it turns out that the horse does hard work and can be punished
(The horse that draws most, is mоѕt whipped), it has to plow, and not only to
carry a rider (Don't make the plоugh go before the horse), etc. The
characterization of the horse turns out to be more complete when
considering the whole concept, but when referring to its core – the prototype –
you can identify stereotypical ideas of society set out in the proverbs.
4.2. PROBLEMS IN CONCEPT MODELING
Modeling a concept raises a number of questions. One of them consists
in the criteria for selection of a concept, defining its boundaries and the
relationship between the concept and the meaning of the word that names it.
For instance, if proverbs containing the “horse” component are taken for
analysis, and the concept “nag” is reconstructed on their basis, do the
proverbs with the “nag” component have any relation to this concept? And
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is there a concept associated only with the word “horse”, and in what
relationship is it with the proverbial concept?
Every researcher of concepts based on linguistic material faces a similar
problem, solving it in his own way. The concept is considered as a mental
formation associated with several words, or as an entity correlated with only
one word and included in the conceptual area along with other concepts that
are similar in content, or the notion of a superconcept is introduced as a
global semantic category that generalizes the meanings of all words of a
certain semantic space. In this case, the “arbitrariness” of the researcher is
inevitable and justified, since it is a question of defining the boundaries
between mental entities. In addition, in the cognitive approach, the
boundaries between categories are considered as vague and non-rigid.
In the process of a particular concept analysis, the researcher calls it a
word and thereby automatically determines the center of the concept's
structure, formed by the meaning of this word. Within the framework of the
second direction of cognitive semantics, the concept is considered, first of
all, as an entity associated with the semantic space of not one, but a group of
linguistic signs. Therefore, starting from the concept center designated by
the word, the researcher involves in the analysis procedure all the linguistic
units semantically related to the given word (words, phraseological units,
proverbs, depending on the initial framework of the concept research).
The concept is not only the ultimate goal of research, but also an
operational unit of analysis, a component of the research apparatus. This
unit does not correspond to a separate linguistic sign or to separate levels of
semantics of a group of linguistic signs. It is composed of elements isolated
in the semantic space formed by the entire semantics of a number of signs
(not only the meaning is taken into account, but also the semantics of the
internal form).
The description of the concept pursues a twofold goal: 1) to study, on
the basis of linguistic semantics, the society's vision of this or that “part of
the world”; 2) to characterize linguistic units as storing knowledge about it.
When modeling mental constructs based on the analysis of the semantic
space formed by linguistic units, the main task of the researcher remains,
first of all, the study of the linguistic sign, what knowledge about the world
and how the linguistic sign conveys.
Reconstruction of concepts based on the study of linguistic semantics
itself makes it possible to describe only one side of the conceptualization of
the world. The connection of this linguistic knowledge with modern views
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prevailing in the linguistic society is rather indirect. The appeal to
experiment, to interpret culture as a spiritual and material activity of
mankind allows us to embrace other facets of the concept. And the
combination of the synchronous approach with the historical one further
expands the boundaries of research. With this approach, the concept turns
into a unit of interdisciplinary research.
QUESTIONS
1. What is the linguistic worldview?
2. What theory is the origin of this concept connected with?
3. Why is the linguistic worldview called naive?
4. How are language and culture related?
5. What does linguoculturology study?
6. What are examples of the worldview reflection in grammar?
7. What are examples of the worldview reflection in vocabulary and
phraseology?
8. What directions of concept research exist in modern linguistics?
9. What methods of concept description can you name?
10. What is cogniteme?
11. What problems arise when modeling a concept?
12. What is the relationship between concept and prototype?
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17. ETHNOCULTURAL SPECIFICITY
OF LEXICAL UNITS
1. Linguistic and Cultural Components of Ethnicity
1.1. Ethnicity as a Subject of Scientific Study
1.2. Language in Ethnic Space
2. Conduits of Ethnocultural Information in the Language
2.1. Multi-vector Trends in the Semantic Cultural Space
3. Translation Strategies for the Ethnocultural Information Transferring
3.1. The Concept of Equivalence from Ethnocultural Positions
3.2. Equivalent Correspondences: Definition, Classification, Types of
Equivalents
3.3. Contextual Correspondences: Definition and Types of Contextual
Correspondences
3.4. Analogues as a Special Type of Lexical Correspondences.
Drawbacks of Translation Analogues
KEY TERMS
Ethnicity, ethno-determinants, culture, ethnolinguistics, sociolinguistics,
ethnopsycholinguistics, linguoculturology, cultural component, cultureme,
linguocultureme, cultural connotation, mechanism of connotation, general
cultural content, specific cultural vocabulary, unique cultural vocabulary,
cultural context, sociocultural competence, cultural resonance, cultural
reference, ethnocultural approach, primary, secondary connotation,
translation strategy, translation tactic, translation techniques and methods,
alienating strategy, domesticating strategy, equivalence, equivalent
correspondences, full and partial equivalents, absolute equivalents, relative
equivalents, variant correspondences, usual contextual correspondences,
occasional contextual correspondences, transformational correspondences,
analogue.
A set of issues arising when discussing ethnocultural bases of lexical
semantics, is extremely wide and qualitatively diverse. The triad of
language – ethnicity – culture can provide an answer to many global
problems associated with the mechanisms that “unite” ethnicity, language
and culture, as well as identify techniques that contribute to the optimization
of intracultural and intercultural communication.
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1. LINGUISTIC AND CULTURAL COMPONENTS
OF ETHNICITY
1.1. ETHNICITY AS A SUBJECT OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY
The term “ethnicity” is interpreted ambiguously by representatives of
various scientific schools and areas within a range of independent
disciplines, which causes terminological inconsistency. To date, there are
following approaches to the concept “ethnicity”:
1. Psychological approach. Ethnicity is understood as a psychological
community in ethnopsychology or ethnic psychology, cultural-historical
psychology, psychological anthropology, cross-cultural psychology, etc.
An ethnic group or ethnicity is a grouping of humans based on people
who identify with each other on the basis of shared attributes (ethno-
determinants) that distinguish them from other groups such as a common
set of traditions, ancestry, language, history, society, culture, nation,
religion, or social treatment within their residing area.
2. Socio-historical approach. Ethnicity is historically established in a
certain area, stable intergenerational set of people who have not only
common features, but also relatively stable features of culture (including
language) and psyche, as well as the consciousness of their unity and
difference from all other similar entities (self-consciousness), fixed in the
self-name (ethnonym) (Y. Bromley).
3. Linguistic approach. A direction in linguistics, studying the
interaction of linguistic, ethnocultural and ethnopsychological factors in the
functioning and evolution of the language.
Exploring the reflection in the language of ethnocultural, folk
psychological and mythological ideas and experiences, ethnolinguistic
research remains in the framework of linguistics. On the other hand, the
subject of research such as the content of culture, folk psychology,
mythology based on language data shows the expansion of linguistic
methodology into ethnography and testifies to the status of crossdisciplinary science based on sources and achievements of many sciences
and the possibility of application complex analysis technique.
4. Psycholinguistic (ethnopsycholinguistic) approach. There are three
large and closely interconnected research areas of ethnopsycholinguistics
(V.A. Vinogradov):
1) analysis of folklore works in the context of material and spiritual
culture;
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2) complex study of cultural-linguistic areas in a common semiotic
approach;
3) description of the linguistic worldview.
Therefore, there is a relationship of succession between psycholinguistic
and ethnopsycholinguistic approaches.
Any of the listed features of the ethnic group is not unique and may be
inherent in other peoples. The structure of these characteristics is unique,
but all the elements included in this structure are common. The uniqueness
of features is assessed through the degree of their manifestation and in
correlation with the general set of values of the people, their socio-economic
system and lifestyle.
1.2. LANGUAGE IN ETHNIC SPACE
Discussion of language in ethnic space involves consideration of the
relationship that exists between nature and culture. Culture is a collection
of elements of nature, processed by people in their own interests. Nature is
everything that is not yet culture. The core of their internal confrontation is
the overcoming of the spontaneous, uncontrollably chaotic nature, and its
“humanization” as a part of culture. The natural factor inevitably left a mark
on lexical semantics, which is confirmed by research of the “cultural” words
with varying degree of lexical representation of similar natural phenomena.
Due to intensive research of the language and culture interaction in the
context of contrastive linguistics in the mid-50s years of the XX century
(V.G. Gak, V. Matesius, J. Catford, R. Lado, etc.) and subsequent formation
of linguoculturology as a separate discipline there is the need to dissociate it
from ethnolinguistics and ethnopsycholinguistics.
Ethnolinguistics is defined as a scientific discipline at the intersection
of ethnography and linguistics and studying the relationship between ethnic
groups and language. In a broad sense, ethnolinguistics includes
dialectology, the language of folklore and part of the language history
studying historical dialectology and cultural history. In the narrow sense,
this is a branch of linguistics studying the constructive role of language and
its impact on the formation and functioning of the national culture, folk
psychology and folk art.
Sociolinguistics and ethnolinguistics approach on the grounds that both
sciences address to the external part of the language. Nevertheless,
sociolinguistics studies the features of social structure of a particular ethnic
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