Semantic cohesion

As a sign, a word also relates to other words or signs that give it a particular value in the verbal text itself or co-text. Beyond individual nouns and sounds, words refer to other words by a variety of cohesive devices that hold the text (pronouns, demonstratives, repetition of the same words from one sentence to the next, or same sounds, recurrence of words that relate to the same idea, conjunctions. These devices capitalize on the associative meanings or shared connotations of a particular community of competent readers who readily recognize the referent. Semantic cohesion depends on a discourse community’s communal associations.

A sign or a word may also relate to the other words or instances of text and talk that have accumulated in a community’s memory over time, or prior text. Russian word dusha denotes “a person’s inner core”, it connotes goodness and truth because it is linked to other utterances spoken and heard in daily life, to literary quotes (e/g/ from Dostoyevsky “His soul overflowing with rapture, he yearned for freedom, space, openness”), or to other verbal concepts such as pricelessness, human will, inner speech, knowledge, feeling, thoughts, religion, that themselves have a variety of connotations. When English speakers translate the word dusha by the word soul, they are linking it to other English words (“disembodied spirit”, “immortal self”, “emotions”), that approximate but don’t quite match the semantic cohesion established for the word in the Russian culture. The meanings of words cannot be separated from other with which they have come to be associated in the discourse community’s semantic pool.

Another linguistic environment within which words carry cultural semantic meaning consists of the linguistic metaphors that have accumulated over time in a community’s store of semantic knowledge. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson Metaphors we Live By: Culture is encoded not only in the semantic structures of a language, but also in its idiomatic expressions that both reflect and direct the way we think. Different languages predispose their speakers to view reality in different ways through the different metaphors they use. In most of the little things we do every day, we simply think and act more or less automatically along certain lines. Most of our ordinary conceptual system is metaphorical in nature. Let us start with the concept ARGUMENT and the conceptual metaphor ARGUMENT IS WAR.

Your claims are indefensible.

He attacked every weak point in my argument.

His criticism was right on the target.

I demolished his argument.

I’ve never won an argument with him.

You disagree? OK, shoot!

If you use that strategy, he’ll wipe you out!

He shot down all of my arguments!

We don’t just talk about argument in terms of war. We see the person we are arguing with as opponent. It is a verbal battle. It structures the actions we perform.

Some of these metaphors are inscribed in the very structure of the English code, for example, the metaphor of the visual field as container. This metaphor delineates what is inside it, outside it, comes into it (“The ship is coming into view”, “I have him in sight”, “He is out of sight now”.

The non-arbitrary nature of signs

Arbitrariness – the random nature of the fit between a linguistic sign and the object that it refers to, e.g. the word “rose” does not look like a rose. The Native speakers do not feel in their body that words are arbitrary signs. For them, words are part of the natural, physical fabric of their lives. For example, anyone brought up in French household will swear that there is a certain natural masculinity about the sun (le soleil) and femininity about the moon (la lune). Even though, we can see that signs are created, not given, and combine with other signs to form cultural patterns of meaning, for native speakers linguistic signs are non-arbitrary, natural reality they stand for.

The major reason for this naturalization of culturally created signs is their motivated nature. Linguistic signs do not signify in a social vacuum. Sign-making and sign-interpreting practices are motivated by the need and desire of language users to influence people, act upon them or even only to make sense of the world around them. Linguistic sign is a motivated sign.