Jerzy Bartmiński

Linguistic worldview as a problem of cognitive ethnolinguistics

(SCLA, Praha, October 15-17, 2009)

Językowy obraz świata w programie etnolingwistyki kognitywnej
Jerzy Bartmiński

Panie Przewodniczący, Szanowni państwo, Panie i Panowie,

Przyjąłem z radością zaproszenie do wygłoszenia referatu na temat JOS i programu badan etnolingwistyki kognitywnej (EC). Czuję się zaszczycony tym że mogę wystąpić na konferencji mieście, które zasłynęło w świecie jako miejsce szkoły lingwistycznej, z której dorobku obficie korzystaliśmy i korzystamy także w Polsce. A poza tym - Praga jest piękna, chętnie się tu przyjeżdża i chętnie wraca. Czystą radością jest spotkanie z przyjaciółmi, ze znajomymi, z „jedinomyszlennikami” – że użyję tego poręcznego rosyjskiego słowa, którym często w naszych rozmowach posługuje się profesor Swietłana Tołstojowa. Zainteresowanie badaniem JOS jest żywe zarówno w Moskwie, jak w Lublinie i w Pradze.

Osobiście przyjmuję z dużą satysfakcją, że skromne badania nad gwarami ludowymi i folklorem, które prowadzę z grupą współpracowników od 40 lat, których syntezą jest wydawany od 1996 roku SSiSL, okazały się bliskie nurtowi kognitywnemu. Wokół Słownika rozwinęła się bogata refleksja i działalność wydawnicza, powstało na jego potrzeby pismo „Etnolingwistyka”, które zresztą od pewnego czasu działa już samodzielnie (zob. t. 2 i 20), wydaliśmy też sporo tomów zbiorowych, o których za chwilę powiem.

Wybitna reprezentantka lingwistyki kognitywnej prof. Elżbieta Tabakowska, napisała niedawno słowa które przyjąłem z wielką satysfakcją:

„Podejmując próbę opisu ‘polskiego kognitywizmu’ należy chyba stwierdzić, że najlepiej reprezentowane są te badania, które sytuują się w nurcie etnolingwistycznym, od lat prowadzone w lubelskim ośrodku akademickim”. (E.Tabakowska, Kognitywizm po polsku – Wczoraj i dziś, Kraków 2004, Universitas, s. 24).

Podobne opinie – o ścisłym związku lubelskiej etnolingwistyki z kognitywizmem - formułowali Henryk Kardela 1988, Renata Grzegorczykowa 1995, Swiełana M. Tołstaja 2005, Henryk Duda 2005, Jörg Zinken 2004, 2009. Bardzo mi odpowiada formuła „etnolingwistyka kognitywna”, którą zaproponował dla naszych prac prof. Jörg Zinken (2004). Użyła jej także prof. Lidia Nepop-Ajdaczyć w wydanej w Kijowie w roku 2007 książce (Polska etnolingwistyka kognitywna. Ta nazwa dobrze się wpisuje w naukowy pejzaż slawistycznych badań antropologiczno-kulturowych, podkreśla zbieżność ale i odrębność w stosunku do takich nurtów etnolingwistyki słowiańskiej, jak etnolingwistyka etymologiczna Władimira Toporowa i etnolingwistyka dialektologiczna Nikity Iljicza Tołstoja.

Etnolingwistyka etymologiczna

Etnolingwistyka dialektologiczna

Etnolingwistyka kognitywna

Na temat przedmiotu etnolingwistyki i jej zadań opublikowaliśmy pakiet materiałów w tomie 18 „E” (o e. rosyjskiej, białoruskiej, serbskiej i polskiej)

Content of my paper:

{1} Basic concepts of cognitive ethnolinguistics

{2} What is cognitive ethnolinguistics?

{3} Problems with terminology

{4} The dilemmas of Slavic ethnolinguistics

{5} Ethnolinguistic research in Lublin

{6} Basic concepts of cognitive ethnolinguistics

{7} Linguistic worldview conception - as a key idea of cognitive ethnolinguistics.

{8} How can we reconstruct the linguistic worldview?

{9} Conclusion

{10} Perspective - EUROJOS

{1} My presentation will deal with the basic concepts of cognitive ethnolinguistics {CE} as it is understood and practiced by scholars associated with the international journal Etnolingwistyka [Ethnolinguistics], published by Maria Curie-Skłodowska University Press in Lublin, Poland (vols. 1-20, 1988-2008).

The basic concepts of CE include:

i) the linguistic worldview;

ii) the values underlying that worldview;

iii) stereotype as a component of the linguistic worldview;

iv) the cognitive defnition as a method of describing stereotypes;

v)viewpoint and perspective;

vi) profling;

vii) the conceptualising and profling subject.

These notions are interlinked with one another and together constitute what I hope is a coherent conception. Since 1981, they have been subjected to discussion at a series of conferences called ‘Language and Culture’. The volumes were published in so called “czerwona seria” in Lublin and “biała seria” (“Język a kultura”) in Wrocław:

• Językowy obraz świata, 1990 (II wyd. 1999, III wyd. 2004)
• Stereotyp jako przedmiot lingwistyki, "JAK" t. 12, 1998;
• Konotacja 1988, O definicjach i definiowaniu 1993;
• Punkt widzenia w języku i w kulturze, 2004
• Profilowanie w języku i w tekście, 1993
• Nazwy wartości, 1993; Język w kręgu wartości, 2004
• Podmiot w języku i w kulturze, 2008.

Of fundamental importance is the linguistic worldview conception which has become the major idea of Polish cognitive ethnolinguistics; sometimes even it is considered as “the central idea of cognitive linguistics” (Grzegorczykowa 2001: 162).

Recently, the conception of the linguistic worldview (JOS) has been applied to the study of various languages and constitutes a basis for a contrastive research project known as EUROJOS, initiated at the 14^th International Slavic Congress in Ohrid, Macedonia, in September 2008. II will return to it in the end of my paper.

But at the beginning I would like to put a general question:

{2} What is cognitive ethnolinguistics?

Ethnolinguistics as a domain of linguistics emerged and grew to its mature form in America, though it is rooted in European, especially German scholarship. This stage in its development is relatively well known and has even received encyclopedic treatment (Crystal 1997, Gudavičius, 2000; Yudin, 1998; Senft, 1998). The last decades of the twentieth century saw a ‘rebirth’ of ethnolinguistics as it said Professor Nikita Tolstoy (1995), a ‘rebirth’ in Eastern and Central Europe. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis received renewed attention, research on language as a cultural phenomenon gained momentum.

This was accompanied by a wave of criticism of structuralist thinking, which isolates language from its psychological, social and cultural context.

This trend also had social and political aspects. Citizens of communist (now post-communist) countries actually experienced the infuence of language on their worldview, feelings and behavior; they knew what linguistic intimidation really was. There was one dominant ideology and one type of public idiom; whole societies experienced the painful incommensurability of the prevalent communist newspeak with reality. This resulted, on the one hand, in social resistance to the imposition of what was perceived as ‘linguistic hypocrisy’, and on the other hand in profound refection on the social and cultural aspects of language. Jerzy Bralczyk, Anna Wierzbicka, Michał Głowiński, Jolanta Rokoszowa, Mirosława Marody and others researched the parlance of the communist propaganda, in which language, in an outdated pseudo-magical manner, took priority over the real world.

On the theoretical plane, emphasis was placed on the problem of linguistic worldview, a picture of the world suggested or imposed (on those not used to reflective thinking) by language.

{3} Problems with terminology

This domain of linguistics has received various names. Apart from ethnolinguistics, there are analytical and less ambiguous terms:

cultural linguistics (Anusiewicz, 1995),

linguo-culturology,

anthropological linguistics,

anthropological-cultural linguistics, or

linguistic anthropology.

All these terms contain the same basic idea: the study of language must also take into account the human speech community and its culture. They are all close to one another; indeed, anthropological linguistics or anthropological-cultural semantics are often treated as synonymous with ethnolinguistics. I prefer the latter term for several reasons.

The ‘inner form’ of the term ethnolinguistics allows or even favors the interpretation of the component ethno- as a subject, who does conceptualise the reality, and not as object, which is conceptualized.

That subjective understanding puts it together with other terms, such as ethnoscience, ethnobotany ‘science of the folk knowledge of plants’, ethnophilosophy, ethnohistory/folk history ‘science of the social perception of history’, medical ethnoscience ‘science of beliefs and practices connected with health and methods of treatment’. Other terms include ethnopoetics, ethnosemantics (IEL, 1992), ethnosynta^, with a few more possibilities opening up with the ethnolinguistic paradigm, such as ethnophraseology.

The basic understanding of ethnolinguistics finds support in ethnomethodology, which focuses on the ‘subjective reconstruction’ of folk understanding of phenomena. It renders ethnolinguistics similar to cognitive anthropology, as well as justifying the use of the term cognitive ethnolinguistics. The term has been proposed by Jörg Zinken (2004.

{4] The dilemmas of Slavic ethnolinguistics

Contemporary views of Slavic linguists on the scope of ethnolinguistics have been mainly shaped by the Moscow school of Nikita I. Tolstoy’s (1995). Tolstoy defined ethnolinguistics narrowly, as a branch of linguistics dealing with language in its relation to culture, or broadly, as a complex discipline whose focus is the whole ‘content plane’ of culture, folk psychology and mythology, understood independently of the means and methods of their formal representation (a word, thing, custom, belief, etc.) (cf. Tolstaya, 2006).

Thus arose ethnolinguistics’ first dilemma: should it be a branch of linguistics or an interdisciplinary field?

The extensive research of the Moscow group, which dealt with Slavic spiritual values, was based on the broad understanding and went beyond the verbal code into the realm of behavior (the actional code) and beliefs (the mental code), as well as into ‘all kinds, genres and forms of folk culture’ (Tolstaya, 2006).

Te problem of the focus and data for ethnolinguistic analysis has been solved in a similar manner in Lublin’s SSSL. The dictionary is also based on three categories of data: linguistic, folkloristic and ethnographic, with the intention to integrate them all on the semantic level.

Does this encroachment of the research scope of ethnolinguistics into culture, entail an extension of ethnolinguistics beyond linguistics proper and onto the interdisciplinary platform? I think not.

If we accept that culture is ‘a set of norms and beliefs, which exist in people’s minds and pertain to the recommended courses of action and proper judgements’, consciousness and a plan of action, (Kłoskowska, 1991: 23) - we can conclude that culture exists in language and constitutes its inalienable component.

The second dilemma concerns an important choice, still pending, between ‘micro-’ and ‘macro-ethnolinguistics’. The former option prefers research on small ethnic communities and their oral ‘micro-languages’, i.e. rural folk dialects in connection with the specific folk culture. The broader option tends to focus on national languages, also those of an international application, such as English or Russian.

The third dilemma, so far unresolved, has far-reaching methodological implications. Te defnition of ethnolinguistics as ‘a branch of linguistics that deals with the language-culture relationship’ (the 1969 supplement to SJPDor, 1962) can mean research on the place of language in culture or vice versa.

In fact, the two conceptions of ethnolinguistics do exist side by side: one is concerned with external, social aspects of language, the other with its internal characteristics, with a pairing of cultural content and linguistic forms, with grammar, lexis and their usage.

The former investigates the status, prestige and power of language in culture, its contact with other languages, bilingualism, languages of national minorities and social groups (cf. Crystal, 1997; Zieniukowa, 1998; Ziółkowski, 1987). In this context ethnolinguistics is treated as a subfield of sociolinguistics (Helbig, 1986: 239) or ecolinguistics (Haugen, 1972).

In the latter understanding, ethnolinguistics deals with manifestations of culture in language. It investigates linguistic structure in relation to the history and culture of specifc communities, especially with the mentality of the group, its behaviors and value system. It attempts to discover the traces of culture in the very fabric of language, in word meanings, phraseology, word formation, syntax and text structure. It strives to reconstruct the worldview entrenched in language as it is projected by the experiencing and speaking subject, homo loquens. This is the conception I embrace. (Cf. the entry of J.Bartmiński “etnolingwistyka” in Wielka encyklopedia PWN, vol. 8, Warszawa 2002, pp. 380–381).

Finally, let me mention the fact that ethnolinguistic research embraces both the oftentimes archaic linguistic past, e.g. Proto-Slavic and Proto-Indo-European, and the linguistic present.

Thus, Russian ethnolinguistics is predominantly historically-oriented, while Polish ethnolinguistics is more concerned with the present. However, the diachrony-synchrony distinction is not so important now as it was in structuralism and sometimes not even overtly recognized: panchronic accounts are frequent and the past – versus - present question is resolved through the conception of ‘the heritage of the past in the present’. A particularly apt formula, zhivaya starina ‘living ancestry’, is used by Russian scholars who publish the results of their research in a journal with the same title.

{5] Ethnolinguistic research in Lublin

Against the Slavic background, Lublin ethnolinguistics (cf. Bartmiński, 1986) must be considered a subfield of linguistics for a few reasons.

First, it is based above all on linguistic data, although it also pays much attention to the social and cultural context, the ‘ad-linguistic’ data, relevant to the process of linguistic communication.

Second, it starts with descriptions of small communities, regional folk dialects, but by definition it also transcends the boundaries of folklore onto the national variety of Polish (its literary and colloquial varieties, elite and mass culture) and even into the inter-ethnic, trans-cultural sphere.

Third, it poses questions about the manifestations of culture in language, not about the position and role of language in culture. Finally, it focuses on the contemporary status quo, which it treats as a stage in the historical process of the development of the language. When it addresses the relationship between language and the mentality of the people who speak it, it draws near and even converges with cognitive linguistics.

Hence, it has for some time now been called ‘cognitive’, which distinguishes it from the otherwise related dialectological and etymological Moscow ethnolinguistics.

{6} Basic concepts of cognitive ethnolinguistics

The fundamental concept of CE - fhe linguistic worldview bases on the cognitive function of the sign.

All the other notions which were mensioned above - relate to the linguistic worldview conception. What are those relationships?

a) First, the linguistic worldview is founded on the values professed by language speakers.

(b) Second, the linguistic worldview embraces socially entrenched or stereotyped images.

(c) Third. a stereotype, its content and the structuring of that content can be systematically captured by the cognitive definition.

(d) Fourth, the linguistic worldview depends on the point of view and perspective on the world assumed by the conceptualizing subject.

(e) Next, the base linguistic worldview is intentionally adapted in discourse and functions in subjective variants called profiles.

(f) Finally, profiling is performed by the speaker (subject) of the utterance, who follows specific intentions and values.

A more comprehensive overview of ethnolinguistics is offered in Bartmiński 2006, 2007, 2009, Бартминьский 2005.

{7} Let me to stay at linguistic worldview conception - as a key idea of cognitive ethnolinguistics.

{7.1] A little history

Almost a century ago, a linguist and a logician independently formulated very similar opinions on the role of language in the process of learning things about the world. Edward Sapir wrote:

Language is heuristic […] in the […] sense that its forms for us certain modes of observation and interpretation. This means of course that as our scientific experience grows we must learn to fight the implications of language. (Sapir, 1957: 7; from the essay Language first published in 1933 in Te Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, New York, vol. IX, pp. 155–169)

Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, a Polish logician, stated:

Not only some but in fact all judgments which we accept and which make up our world view, depend on the conceptual apparatus we use to portray our experience, rather than on the experience itself. Te choice of this or that apparatus will change the picture. (Ajdukiewicz, 1934/1985: 175)

Today, it makes little difference that one statement pertains to language while the other to thinking - because one of ‘the most significant achievements of the cognitive linguistics enterprise’ is ‘an integrated view of language and thought’ (Evans, Bergen and Zinken, 2007: 29–30). The conception which unites language and thinking, what is linguistic and what is mental, as well as providing the basis for their methodical analysis, is the linguistic worldview conception.

The conception of the linguistic worldview derives from the American ethnolinguists Eward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, but is also related to German ethnolinguistic thought - Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Weltansicht and the work of his continuator Leo Weisgerber.

According to Philip Bock (2003), its roots lie in Aristotle’s idea of topoi (loci communes) (Aristotle, Poetics, II, 21–22).

Since the 1970s the worldview conception has been developing intensively in Slavic countries, especially in Russia and Poland, but recently also in Belarus, Ukraine and the Czech Republic (Bartmiński, 2004a; Yudin, 2004b).

{7.2.} The conception of the linguistic worldview embraces all three apices of Ogden and Richards’ triangle (1923): the linguistic sign (pies ‘dog’), the mental image of a dog, and the class of real-life dogs:

obraz (pojęcie) mental image of a ‘dog’

językowy (wyraz) świata (zjawisko realne)
the linguistic sign (pies /dog),the class of real-life dogs

 

The three elements are considered in the onomasiological and/or semasiological perspectives.

onomasiological perspectives:

the class of real-life dogs > mental image of a ‘dog’

> the linguistic sign (dog)

semasiological perspectives:

the linguistic sign (dog) > the class of real-life dogs

> mental image of a ‘dog’ (connotation)

A systematic description of the linguo-cultural worldview of the folk variety of Polish (one of the two basic varieties of the language) is Dictionary of folk symbols and stereotypes (SSSL, 1996–1999).

{7.3} What is linguistic worldview?

Linguistic worldview is a language-entrenched interpretation of reality, which can be expressed in the form of judgments about the world, people, things or events. It is an interpretation, not a refection; it is a portrait without claims to fidelity, not a photograph of real objects. The interpretation is a result of subjective perception and conceptualization of reality performed by the speakers of a given language; thus, it is clearly subjective and anthropocentric but also intersubjective (social). It unites people in a given social environment, creates a community of thoughts, feelings and values. It influences the perception and understanding of the social situation by a member of the community.

The worldview is ‘naive’ in the sense of Apresyan, i.e. constructed by a human being, relative to human measure, anthropometric, but also adapted to social needs and ethnocentric mentality (Apresjan, 1994).

For example - in the colloquial, naive view of humans and their world, the sun still rises and sets (five centuries after Copernicus!), stars twinkle, the road goes from one place to another, water is healthy or not, plants are good and useful (corn, herbs) or not (weeds), things are cold, heavy or tall in relation to an average person, etc. Te worldview is based on sensory stimuli, concrete and practical: it suffices for the purpose of everyday communication. It is at the disposal of the speaker as his or her cultural endowment: as all linguistic constructs, it may be subjected to individual modulation.

{7.4} How can we reconstruct the linguistic worldview?

{7.4.1} Lexis

The most obvious, unquestionable basis for investigating linguistic worldview has so far been the lexis, conceived of as a classifier of social experience. The lexis provides access to the conceptual sphere of a given culture, the realm of conceptions and images crucial for that culture. Sapir emphasised that “vocabulary is a very sensitive index of the culture of a people” (Sapir, 1957: 34, 36). In this context, the first and fundamental question is the very range of lexis (words and concepts); lexis as an ‘inventory of culture’, living and dynamic, continually enriched with new items, a kind of seismograph registering changes in the society, civilization and culture.

Interesting aspects of lexis include the organization of lexical-semantic fields (colour, measurement or kinship terms, names of emotions, values etc.), axiological and semiotic oppositions (good/bad, close/distant, us/them, familiar/alien) or the semantic content of individual items, especially of “cultural key words”.

The next issue is that of lexical meaning. I understand the meaning of a word in the integral sense, comprising both the core with the superordinate hyperonymous category (e.g. donkey – animal) and a number of characteristics attributed to the object on the basis of ‘encyclopedic’ information about it (a donkey is ‘a domesticated animal, pack or draught’, ‘grey’, ‘with long ears’, ‘with a thin tail’, ‘half as tall as a person’, ‘with a big head’, ‘similar to a horse’). Te meaning also includes several clearly subjective features, traditionally called ‘lexical connotations’ and excluded from linguistic description (a donkey is ‘stubborn, stupid’, hence Pol. osioł also means ‘a stupid, stubborn person’). The whole recognizable semantic richness of a word, with its lexical, encyclopedic and cultural connotations, can be described by means of the cognitive definition. The meaning of word can be described only in a lexical-semantic field by means of cognitive definition, also in the whole extensive network of relations between the elements of a given field. These relations are hypero- and hypo-nymic, equonymic (i.e. synonymic and antonymic), regular derivational sequences of a word-formational and semantic nature, as well as syntagmatic, describable in terms of Fillmore’s conception of semantic roles.

I will illustrate cognitive definition by the entry for koń ‘horse’ from SLSJ - the tentative volume of SSiSL, published in 1980 in Wrocław.

The horse in traditional village culture is perceived not so much as an animal, but as a ‘domestic animal’, an element of the livestock. Te closest hyperonyms of koń are inwentarz żywy, żywina, chudoba ‘livestock’.

Hyponyms of koń are, with regard to sex: kobyła ‘mare’ and ogier ‘stallion’/wałach gelding’; with regard to age: źrebię ‘foal’; with regard to colour: kasztan ‘chestnut’, bułan/bułanek ‘dun, siwek grey’ etc.

Co-hyponyms of koń as an element of livestock are other domestic animals: frst of all wol ‘ox’ and krowa cow’, wieprz ‘hog’ and świnia ‘pig’, baran ‘ram’ and owca ‘sheep’, then pies ‘dog’ and suka ‘bitch’.

The horse is perceived in certain typical collections: with a saddle, reins and bridle (a saddle-horse), with a cart and a plough (a draught-horse) or with a man who rides it (a cavalryman, a soldier). With regard to its strength the horse is similar to the bull, lion and bear; the sun is also compared to the horse.

Cultural equivalents of the horse are the motor-bike and the car.

The horse is conventionally contrasted with the gentle ox, stupid donkey, slow slug, wild and stupid wolf, small and limp frog and the useless mouse.

Te word koń enters into regular semantic derivations, is subjected to the process of metaphorisation: a grown-up man is called stary koń ‘old horse’, a sexually active man is called ogier stallion’, if someone laughs too loudly, the person rży ‘neighs’, someone who has died wyciqgnął kopyta ‘stretched his/her hoofs’, a horse may be sorry for its owner (in a soldier’s song) or may laugh (koń by się uśmiał, lit. ‘a horse would laugh’, used when a joke fell fat).

The lexeme koń also participates in word-formational derivational sequences: koński ‘of a horse; like a horse; equine’ but also in the qualitative sense in końska dawka leków ‘big, powerful dose of medication, koński ząb ‘a type of maize with long seeds which have a hollow at the top’; koński ogon ‘pony tail’.

The entry for koń in SLSJ contains collocations, in the form of defining statements, which answer the following questions:

• what is a horse like? the characteristics: strong, bay, grey;
• what is a horse built like? it has a mane and a tail, hoofs, the head, four legs;
• how is the horse quantified? in what numbers does it occur? a pair, a herd of horses;
• what does the horse do? the behaviour: eats hay, snorts, neighs, kicks about;
• what is done to the horse? what is it the object of? they buy it, saddle it, harness it to the plough;
• what is the horse used for? for horseback rides, pulling carts, ploughing;
• where does the horse stay? the location: the stables.

In the dictionary of symbols and stereotypes (SSSL), which is a record of a traditional linguistic worldview, all entries are explicated in more or less that way. Depending on the specific nature of individual entries, various semantic subcategories are distinguished, such as collections of objects, the structure (the components of the object), attributes, quantification, actions (the object as the agent, sensor, stator, processor), the origin, the object as the source or stimulus of peoples sensations, the theme of activity, the addressee of utterances, the object as a tool or instrument, the place and time of its occurrence, its similarities to other objects etc.

The particular interesting problem is that of hyperonyms.

It is important in defining words to establish the point of departure, i.e. the superordinate category to which a given object is assigned and in terms of which it is characterized. A definition which aims to reflect the conceptualization of the object must, in the case of, say, bluebottle (Pol. bławatek) choose between a ‘plant’, ‘flower’ and ‘weed’, in the case of wheat (Pol. pszenica) between a ‘plant’, ‘grass’ and ‘corn’, in the case of the sun between a ‘gaseous sphere’, a ‘heavenly body’, a ‘star’, ‘light’ etc. Each choice has its consequences, for it determines the perspective of conceptualization, as well as introducing more or less distinct characteristics. Sometimes the super ordinate categorizing element determines the content and structure of the definition. If the dictionary definition is to have a linguistic nature, to reflect the understanding of the object by the speaker and to contribute to the reconstruction of linguistic worldview, it must respect the colloquial conceptualization. First, it must select the hyperonym from the closest taxonomic level, relative to the language user, not the researcher (e.g. wheat is a corn, not a plant (the principle is discussed in Bartmiński, 1991a). Second, it must take note of the point of view of the subject (the sun is light, not a gaseous sphere). Te selection of the superordinate category is also related to the accepted system of values: the identification of categories such as weeds and corn derives from the pragmatic outlook onto the plant world typical of a farmer.

An important aspect of linguistic worldview is the so called ‘inner form’ of a word (Humboldt’s innere Sprachform, innere Gedankenform), also mentioned by Jan Rozwadowski (died 1935), a pioneer of the cognitivist approach in Poland. Especially in the case of languages with rich word formation, e.g. the Slavic branch, asking questions about the mechanism of creating names and about their onomasiological foundations, allows for accessing the linguistic means of interpretation of a given object or phenomenon.

Let me to give some examples.

The conceptualisations of natural phenomena can also be revealed through an analysis of their names.

For example, a rainbow may receive its name from its connection with clouds (e.g. the Polish tęcza is related to Russian tuča ‘cloud’), the rain (German Regenbogen, English rainbow), an arch-like shape (French arc-en-ciel, Lithuanian vaivorykštė, English rainbow).

The Earth’s satellite is called księżyc in Polish (‘a young priest’, ‘prince’, originally ‘new moon’) or miesiąc (from measuring time; the root *mēs-‘measure’ is present in many other languages); in Russian it is called luna (from luna, Pol. łuna ‘glow in the sky’, cf. REW, 1950–1958).

The planet Venus is colloquially categorised as a star and termed relative to the time of its appearance: Gwiazda Poranna ‘The Morning Star’/Jutrzenka, from jutro ‘tomorrow’, or Gwiazda Wieczorna/Wieczornica ‘The Evening Star’ (SSSL, 1996–1999, vol. 1–1 ⁵), or the time when it can be seen, cf. Ukrainian Zirnycia, from zora ‘light, glow’, Russian Dennitsa, from den ‘day’.

The names of other stars are clearly mythological, e.g. the Pleiades, in Polish folk tradition called Baby ‘women’, Kwoka ‘broodhen’ (with chiks), or Sito ‘sieve’. The last name is connected with the image of the sky as a dome with holes in it through which the light of heaven can be seen (cf. SSSL, 1996–1999, vol. 1–1: 246–249).

Names contain a perspective from which reality is viewed.

The Polish suwerenność ‘sovereignty’ is treated as a synonym of niezależność, niezawisłość and niepodległość ‘independence’, but each form represents a diferent viewpoint.

Suwerenność is an adapted borrowing of the French souverenité and is conceptually related to zwierzchnictwo ‘supremacy’: it is a manifestation of the ‘top-down’ perspective.

Niezależność, niezawisłość and niepodległość manifest a rank-and-file perspective, from the point of view of the party threatened with the loss of self-government and self-sufficiency, with dependence and subordination. A similar internal form can be found in other languages: Russian nezavisimost’, Ukrainian nezalezhnist’, German Unabhängigkeit.

{7.4.2} Phraseological units, collocations, metaphors

Researchers of linguistic worldview are especially interested in phraseological units, although many of the latter are idiomatic combinations with opaque motivations (e.g. wieszać psy na kimś ‘abuse someone’, lit. ‘hang dogs on someone’). Their conventionality can be seen in cross-linguistic comparisons.

For example, referring to someone’s speedy escape Poles say wziąć nogi za pas, lit. ‘take one’s legs behind one’s belt’, Germans say die Beine in die Hand nehmen, lit. ‘take legs in the hand’, the English say to take to one’s heels, the French say prendre ses jambes a son cou, lit. ‘take the legs on the neck, and Slovaks say vziat’ nohy naplecia, lit. ‘take the legs on the back - and it is difficult to draw any far-reaching conclusions from those data.

The ‘phraseological picture of the world’ has certain peculiar characteristics and is usually based on historical, often fossilized knowledge, which can only be accessed through etymological investigations.

Closer to contemporary linguistic feeling, more informative for the contemporary interpretation of the world are living collocations.

For example, much can be learned about the colloquial conceptualization of the category TEKST (English text) from the collocability of the word tekst with other words. Te analysis of collocations (Niebrzegowska-Bartmińska, 2007: 23-31) allows one to reconstruct the colloquial picture, whose features are grouped into facets, pertaining to:

[AUTHOR]

[STYLE]

[GENRE], [SUBJECT MATTER]

[STRUCTURE]

[CHARACTERISTICS]

[ACTION IN RELATION TO IT]

[ADDRESSEE]

[TIME] [PLACE]

 

tekst poety/polityka

‘a poet’s/politician’s text’;

tekst urzędowy/poetycki/naukowy ‘an ofcial/poetic/scholarly text’;

tekst dramatu/pieśni ‘a play’s text/song lyrics’;

tekst podzielony na rozdziały i akapity

‘a text divided into chapters and paragraphs’;

tekst rozwlekły/krótki ‘a verbose/short text’;

redagować/korygować/streszczać tekst ‘edit/correct/summarise a text’; rozumieć/przyswoić/objaśnić tekst ‘understand/explain a text’;

teksty niezrozumiałe dla niewtajemniczonych ‘texts inaccessible to the uninitiated’; mówić otwartym tekstem ‘speak openly’, lit. ‘in an open text’;

tekst z okazji imienin

‘a text for someone’s birthday’;

tekst w gazecie/na murze

‘a text in a newspaper/on the wall’.

In Polish, texts are conceptualised metaphorically in a number of ways: as a result of the work of:

a crafsman, such as a weaver (snuć opowieść/wątek/nić opowiadania, lit. ‘spin a story/motif/the thread of a story’),

a cook (a text may be pikantny ‘spicy’, smakowity ‘delicious’, niestrawny ‘unpalatable’),

a builder (plan/szkic tekstu ‘a plan/sketch of a text’; piętra tekstu ‘several storeys of a text’; budować/klecić tekst ‘to build/botch up a text’);

a farmer or gardener (tekst dojrzewa ‘a text ripens’; pomysł kiełkuje ‘an idea sprouts’; tekst jest owocem pracy ‘a text is the fruit of one’s work’);

an artist or a musician (rama tekstu ‘the frame of a text’; drugi plan tekstu ‘the background of a text’; autor maluje coś w jakichś barwach ‘the author paints something in such and such colours’; autor porusza czułą strunę ‘the author pulls a sensitive string’).

A text may ranić ‘hurt’ and be ostry ‘sharp’ or cięty ‘biting’ – thus it may be conceptualised as an instrument or a weapon.

Niebrzegowska-Bartmińska says:A survey of all metaphorical models clearly shows that metaphors are selective and concentrate on some characteristics at the expense of others. […] In all models, text is treated as the result of the activity of a given subject. (2007: 31). Hence, metaphors select features from a rich, multiaspectual characterization of text and ‘profile’ the concept.

{7.4.3} Grammar

Te most stable, unquestionable basis for the reconstruction of linguistic worldview is grammar, uniform throughout a national language. Te categories of person, number, gender, tense, mood or case are relatively easily observable and comparable (on the cross-cultural scale) mechanisms of the conceptualization of reality. Te conceptualization is forced by the language system, though as all linguistic forms it can be used by the speaker in various ways, also consciously omitted or even contested.

Let me offer an example. In Polish inflectional morphology, in noun declensions, there exist the categories of masculinity and non-masculinity: the endings -i and -owie in Nom.Sg. occur with nouns referring to persons of male sex (chłop-i ‘peasants’, pan-owie ‘gentlemen’), while the remaining nouns, i.e. referring to non-male persons and things, occur with a single ending -y (kobiet-y ‘women’, kot-y ‘cats’, stoł-y ‘tables’, problem-y ‘problems’).

The distinction also occurs in verbs in the past tense: stal-i ‘they stood’ (male persons) vs. stał-y ‘they stood’ (non-male persons or things).

The greater salience of reference to male persons is treated as a manifestation of the ‘virilisation of Polish’ (Baudouin de Courteney’s expression) and is thought to be a remnant of male dominance in public life. Te dominance is a tradition-sanctioned relic, recently contested as a manifestation of linguistic discrimination of women (Szpyra-Kozłowska and Karwatowska, 2005).

{7.4.5} Texts

Linguistic research at large, including the reconstruction of linguistic worldview, is primarily based on analyses of texts, i.e. holistic messages with a topic, sender, receiver and a communicative context. Texts contain both systemic features and manifestations of social conventions (stylistic and generic norms), as well as individual features, which result from the creativity of the speaker. Let us begin with what I call ‘stereotyped texts’.

The shortest stereotyped texts are proverbs. They express the so called ‘folk wisdom’, general knowledge passed on to individual receivers by the community for pedagogical purposes. They tend to contain universal quantifiers, such as every, no, always, never, as is typical of stereotypes. Proverbs are based on typical events and figures from the represented world, which allows one to use them as linguistic evidence in the reconstruction of the worldview.

In authored rather than reproduced texts, the element of auctorial creation is very strong, ⁹ so the texts require a special analysis, distinguishing what is communicated as a novelty and asserted from what has been used as a point of departure, the background, a hidden presupposition. Te communicative strategy requires that novel information be conveyed (one usually apologizes for platitudes). For the researcher of linguistic worldview it is the opposite: attention is paid to what in the utterance is treated as obvious, unquestionable, trivial or banal.

A special role in this context is played by coordinate contrastive clauses, clauses of concession, result or cause, introduced by the conjunctions and adverbs but, so, because or therefore:

‘John is a father but he does not look afer his children’ (presupposition: fathers look afer their children);

‘Mikhail does not like music, though he comes from Ukraine’ (presupposition: Ukrainians are music lovers);

‘He got himself a dog, so he felt safer immediately’

(presupposition: a dog gives its owner the feeling of safety);

‘I told him everything frankly because I considered him a friend’ (presupposition: a friend can be trusted).

 

{7.4.6} ‘Ad-linguistic’ data

A full reconstruction of linguistic worldview must also take into account yet another type of data, which I call ‘ad-linguistic’, composed of the socially entrenched, belief-based knowledge of the world, common to the speaker (sender) and the hearer (receiver). Without reference to this type of knowledge, normal communication or interpretation of utterances is impossible (Muszyński, 1988; Korżyk, 1999).

The set of ad-linguistic data, relevant to the process of communication, also includes conventionalized patterns of behavior. Regardless of the fact that speaking as such is behavior and action (Austin, 1962), an important clue in interpreting verbal texts is the awareness of obligations and prohibitions especially those obtaining in a given culture.

For example, doubts as to a metaphorical or mythological understanding of sentences such as : ‘The sun is joyful’, The stars look upon us’, ‘The heaven/sky is angry’ or ‘The earth gives birth’ is decided by the knowledge of beliefs relating to the animistically understood nature and to the principles of behaviour with respect to it. ¹⁰

Let us take the heavenly bodies. In archaic folk tradition, one must behave towards them in the same way as one would towards living creatures: the sun must not be pointed at, the earth must not be hit with a stick in spring, when it is pregnant with new life, etc. Therefore, the sentences above have, for the members of the community in which they exist, a mythological, rather than a metaphorical, sense. It is the behavior (obligations or prohibitions) that ‘defnitely interprets’ the meanings of terms in the sense proposed by Charles Peirce.

{7.7}Questionnaires

A distinct place in research on linguistic worldview is reserved for questionnaires. Open questions about the meanings of words and characteristics of objects are particularly valuable, but they are more difficult to interpret than ‘closed’ ones, which contain ready-made answers to choose from. Those are easier for the researcher to handle but pose a danger of creating artifacts.

The examples of home, mother, homeland or a German (discussed in later chapters) show that experimental (questionnaire-based) research gives access to the contemporary linguistic awareness of speakers, allows one to reveal more features attributed to the object, and indicates different degrees of entrenchment of specific features (manifested as different ranks in frequency lists).

Systemic data, on the other hand, embrace well-entrenched, historical, sometimes frozen features, which, however, are not numerous.

Results of questionnaires may diverge from systemic data - but the two may certainly be reconciled. Indeed, they complement each other.

At the stage of statistical breakdown of questionnaire data, an important characteristic of meaning is manifested, namely its openness.

For example, features attributed to a typical mother are indicated with different frequencies (from about 35% to a mere handful), which points not only to different degrees of their entrenchment but also to a lack of a clear threshold level below which a given feature is not included in the word’s meaning as insignifcant in the speakers’ awareness. Is it 50%, 40% (Kapiszewski, 1978) or perhaps 20%? In closed questionnaires the percentage is higher; in open ones it is much lower. ¹¹

Two factors are worth mentioning here.

First, rare or idiosyncratic answers may be very interesting from the cognitive perspective, as they may signal new, emerging linguistic tendencies.

Second, if the rare answers are collected from large numbers of respondents and analyzed collectively, they may indicate changes in the evaluation of the object or show otherwise hardly noticeable shifts in the object’s linguistic profiling. This is exactly what we observed in our axiological questionnaires, consisting of a hundred questions each, administered in 1990 and 2000 to two thousand students in Lublin (results in Bartmiński, 2006a).

The fact that the results of questionnaires need not coincide with dictionary definitions or with phraseological analyses must not be taken, in the spirit of Kiklevich (2007), as an indication of flaws in the former. It may suggest that lexicographic definitions are imperfect (it is enough to compare definitions from various dictionaries) and should in fact be verified with respect to the more reliable questionnaire data (cf. Bartmiński, 2007b: 50–52).

{8) Conclusion

The linguistic worldview conception is strictly semantic and unites all levels of language, it has become a tool for the holistic and integrated description of language, without a split into unrelated fields, such as lexicology and grammar, text linguistics and pragmatics, syntax and morphology. The linguistic worldview approach facilitates their integration; see the entry Językowy obraz świata - JOS - in WE PWN 2002, vol. 8,written by J.Bartmiński.

The global linguistic worldview includes stereotypes. These are collective images of people, places and events, containing features treated as ‘normal’ and typically attributed to those objects and events.

Linguistic worldview is diversified for style and genre, and at the level of discourse it is subjected to profiling depending on the intentions of the speaking subject.

Finally, the linguistic worldview conception can play a major role in comparative research.

{9}. Perspective

Interest in comparative research on linguistic worldviews was openly voiced during the International Slavic Congress in Ohrid, Macedonia, September 10–16, 2008.

About it you can find information in 20 volume of “Etnolingwistyka” (2008), and in my paper “Kakie cennosti učastvujut v formirovanii jazykovoj kartiny mira slavjan” (published after the Congress) - some copies of the last paper I am leaving on the chairman’desk for the interest’s;

The paper is available in Internet http:// etnolinguistica-slavica.org).

I would like to add, that in my opinion very important lecture during the Congrss was the one delivered by Aleksandr Moldovan. The head of the Institute of Slavic Studies within the Russian Academy of Sciences, said in his opening address that (quotation):

„Ethnolinguistics is a continuation of the former tradition of global approaches to Slavic languages, folk cultures and social and national life, with a view to reconstructing the relevant cultural content’. It also responds to a wider need of developing a culture-oriented philology. Relating to the work of Nikita Tolstoy, Svetlana Tolstoy, Nina Arutyunova, Yuriy Apresjan or Yuriy Stepanov, he underscored the importance of research on ‘cultural codes’, of explicating ‘cultural concepts’, and of inquiring into the nature of words and texts from the perspective of the ‘underlying categories of worldview and cognition, such as time, space, the human being, boundary/border, freedom, shortage, gender differences, eroticism, or the oppositions: centre–periphery, good–evil, us–them, sacred–profane, life–death’ ((Moldovan, 2008: 9; 34–35).

In my opinion - all the crucial ideas discussed in my paper –and in my book SCE 2009 - i.e. the linguistic worldview, stereotypes as colloquial images, the reconstruction of stereotypes by means of the cognitive definition, the profiling of base images in discourse relative to a viewpoint and a system of values – relate to the subject as the prime experiencing, conceptualizing and coding authority. Having been marginalized by structural linguistics, the subject – especially the individual but also the collective – is appreciated by cognitive ethnolinguistics. Te individual subject is experienced empirically, the collective subject is a secondary conceptual construct, which is derived from the former, but which is also important for its role in establishing national (but regional and transnational too) identities.

Thank you for attention.

Dziękuję za uwagę.

References:

• Bartmiński, Jerzy, 2006, Językowe podstawy obrazu świata, Lublin : Wyd. UMCS (III wydanie 2009).
• Bartmiński, Jerzy, 2007, Stereotypy mieszkają w języku. Studia etnolingwistyczne, Lublin : Wyd. UMCS.
• Bartmiński, Jerzy, 2009, Aspects of Cognitive Ethnolinguistics. London and Oakville, CT: Equinox.
• Grzegorczykowa, Renata. 2001. Wprowadzenie do semantyki językoznawczej. [Introduction to linguistic semantics] 3rd ed. Warszawa: PWN.
• Językowy obraz świata, red. J. Bartmiński, Lublin : Wyd. UMCS, 1990 (III wyd. 2004).
• Obraz svĕta v jazyce, red. I. Vaňková , Praha 2001.
• Ogden, C. K. and A. I. Richards 1923, The problem of meaning in primitive languages. In Ogden, C. K. and A. I. Richards (eds.) The Meaning of Meaning. 296-336. London: International library of psychology, philosophy and scientific method.
• SSSL, 1996-1999. Słownik stereotypów i symboli ludowych. [Dictionary of Folk Stereotypes and Symbols] Vols. 1-1 and 1-2. Ed. J. Bartmiński. Lublin: Wyd. UMCS.
• Wierzbicka, Anna, 1985, Lexicography and conceptual analysis, Ann Arbor.
• Бартминьский, Ежи , 2005, Языковой образ мира: очерки по этнолингвистике, Mосква : Индрик.
• Pоль человеческого фактора в языкe, ред. Б. A. Серебренников, Mосква, 1988.
• CД, 1995-2009 Славянские древностии.Этнолингвистический словарь под общей редакцией Н.И.Толстого, т. 1-4.
• *
• Ethnolinguistic dictionaries (Dictionary of Folk Stereotypes and Symbols, SSSL 1996-1999, Lublin, or Славянские древностии, CД I - IV, 1994-2009, Moscow) provide linguistic-cultural portraits of the Universe, plants, animals and people – “signs of the spiritual culture” of Slavs (cf. Polish niebo, Russian небо 'sky, heaven'); they also describe the oppositions of us/them, human/animal, or left/right.