Lecture
Cognitive linguistics studies linguistic consciousness, the image of the world existing in the human mind. Linguistic consciousness should be understood as one of the aspects of human consciousness connected with the speech activity of the individual. A psychological dictionary gives the following definition of consciousness: consciousness – is “the highest level of mental reflection of reality, a totality of sensory and mental images that appear directly before the subject in his ‘inner’ experience and that anticipate his practical activity”.
The image of the world existing in consciousness presupposes a representation of external reality. By reality one should understand everything that exists, material, really existing and imagined, belonging to consciousness and lying outside it. The image of the world is connected with the notion of the “conceptual picture of the world”.
Above we have already spoken about concepts, their structure, forms and ways of conceptualization. The conceptual picture of the world – is the representation of the world existing in our consciousness, given in the form of specifically organized and structured concepts. In essence, the conceptual picture of the world is not a picture depicting the world, but the world understood as a picture. In the human psyche, objects of surrounding reality are reflected through mediation by object meanings and corresponding cognitive schemas. This reflection can be an object of conscious reflection. In essence, the picture of the world is a reflection of the surrounding world in the human mind. It appears as the result of the past of the people to which we consider ourselves to belong.
The linguistic picture of the world – is “the world in the mirror of language”. It is sometimes said that this is a “secondary ideal world in linguistic flesh”. It can be said that the linguistic picture of the world is a totality of knowledge about the world captured in vocabulary, phraseology, and grammar.
The preservation of a language is explained by the stability of its sound and grammatical structure. In other words, the stability of a language rests on its systemic character and structural character.
The terms system and structure often replace one another, but they do not coincide in all their meanings.
In the “Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language”: the word system (of Greek origin, literally “a whole made up of component parts”), the word structure (of Latin origin, “construction, arrangement”)
System and structure of language imply that language has an internal order, an organization of parts into a single whole.
Systemic character and structural character characterize language and its units as a single whole from different sides. By structure is meant the unity of heterogeneous elements within the whole. System – is the unity of homogeneous, mutually conditioned elements.
A complex structure of interconnected and heterogeneous elements is typical of language. The structure of language includes various elements and the functions inherent in them. It is formed by the following levels (tiers):
phonetic,
morphological,
lexical,
syntactic,
(textual),
(cultural).
The notion of the last two levels/tiers was introduced into scholarly use comparatively recently; however, not all scholars hold the view that these levels should be considered within the framework of the linguistic analysis of the language system. Indeed, these two levels/tiers take us beyond the bounds of the language system proper in the traditional linguistic sense and connect language directly with the society and culture within which it functions.
The units of the phonetic tier are phonemes (sounds) – the material embodiments of language; they perform two basic functions: the perceptive function (the function of perception) and the significative, or distinctive, function (the ability to distinguish meaningful elements of language – morphemes, words, sentences, cf.: тот (‘that’), рот (‘mouth’), кот (‘cat’), стал (‘became’), стол (‘table’), etc.).
The units of the morphological tier – morphemes – express notions:
a) root (material) morphemes, cf.: [-стол-] (‘table’), [-зем-] (‘earth’), etc.;
b) non-root morphemes of 2 kinds: the meanings of features, cf.: [-ость] (‘-ness’), [без-] (‘without-’), [пере-] (‘re-, trans-’), and the meanings of relations, cf.: [-у], [-ишь], etc., for example, сиж-у (‘I sit’), сид-ишь (‘you sit’), стол-а (‘of the table’), стол-у (‘to the table’).
This is the semasiological function of expressing notions, but not of naming them. The morpheme does not name; only the word possesses the nominative function. By naming something, we turn a morpheme into a word. For example, the root красн- (‘red-’) expresses the notion of a particular colour, but краснота (‘redness’, a noun) names a phenomenon. It is therefore held that the morpheme, as the smallest meaningful unit of language, possesses meaning, but this meaning is bound – it is realized only in combination with other morphemes. It is true that this statement is fully valid for affixes, and only partially valid for root morphemes (see the example given above).
The units of the lexical level – lexemes (words) – name things and phenomena of reality; they perform the nominative function. The lexical level of the language system is special in the sense that its units are considered the basic units of language. It is at the lexical level that semantics is most fully represented. The study of the lexical composition of a language is the concern of a whole series of linguistic disciplines: lexicology, phraseology, semantics, semasiology, onomastics, and others.
The units of the syntactic level – phrases and sentences – perform the communicative function, that is, they are necessary for communication. This level is also called the constructive-syntactic or communicative-syntactic level. It can be said that the basic unit of this level is the sentence model. The study of the sentence is the concern of syntax.
The elements of all the levels in a language form a unity, which is expressed in the fact that each lower rank is potentially the next higher one and, conversely, each higher rank consists of at least one lower one. For example, a sentence may consist of one or more words, a word – of one or more morphemes, a morpheme – of one or more phonemes.
Language units are formed at a lower level, but function at a higher one.
For example, a phoneme is built at the phonemic level, but functions at the morphemic level as a meaning-distinguishing unit.
This property of language units links the levels of language into a single system.
Within each level/tier of the language structure (phonetic, morphological, lexical, syntactic), its units form their own separate system, that is, all the elements of the given level act as members of the system. The systems of the individual tiers of the language structure form the general system of the given language.
In order to speak about the relations between the units of language, it is necessary to introduce and define the following notions: language units, category of language, level/tier, language relations.
Language units – are its permanent elements, differing from one another in structure, purpose and place in the system of language.
According to their purpose, language units are divided into:
Nominative – the word (lexeme)
Communicative – the sentence
Constructive – phonemes and morphemes, word forms and phrase forms
Language units are distributed among categories and levels (tiers).
Categories of language – are groups of homogeneous language units; categories are united on the basis of a common categorial feature, usually a semantic one. For example, in Russian there are the categories of tense and aspect of the verb, case and gender, the categories of collectiveness, animacy, and others.
Level (tier) of language – is a set of units and categories of language of the same type: phonetic, morphological, lexical, syntactic.
Language relations – are the interconnections between the tiers and categories of language, its units and their parts.
The basic types of relations between the units of language are: paradigmatic, syntagmatic and hierarchical.
Paradigmatic relations (Greek paradigma – example, model) – are relations that unite language units into groups, classes, categories. Elements standing in paradigmatic relations form a class of phenomena of the same type. Paradigmatic relations are relations of choice.
For example, the system of consonants, the system of declension, and the synonymic series rest on paradigmatics. In using language, paradigmatic relations make it possible to choose the necessary unit, and also to form words and their forms by analogy with those already existing in the language, for example, the case forms of a single word, synonymic series.
Syntagmatic relations unite units in their simultaneous sequence. These are relations of units arranged linearly, for example, in the flow of speech. Syntagmatic relations underlie morphemes as combinations of phonemes, words as sets of morphemes and syllables, phrases and sentences as sets of words, complex sentences – as sets of simple sentences.
Hierarchical relations connect the levels of language with one another; these are relations of structurally simpler units to more complex ones (recall: units are formed at a lower level, but function at a higher one).
All these types of relations in the system of language are not isolated; they determine one another to one degree or another.
Originally, speech sounds were defined as sound formations corresponding to letters: letters were “pronounced”, they were “hard” and “soft”, “vowels” and “consonants”. The development of linguistics in the 19th century made it possible to look differently at the relationship between letters and sounds, since by that time sufficient material had accumulated for comparing the sounds of modern and ancient languages, as well as the sounds of related languages.
Speech sounds have a complex nature, and therefore, within linguistics, separate phonetic disciplines gradually took shape that study various aspects of speech sounds: phonetics (acoustic and articulatory) and phonology (functional phonetics).
Phonetics studies the sound system of a language: speech sounds and the rules for combining them into words in the flow of speech, the inventory of the sounds of a language, their systemic properties, sound laws. The sphere of interest of phonetics also includes the syllable, stress, and intonation.
As a natural phenomenon, a speech sound can be considered in three aspects:
the acoustic aspect (studied by speech acoustics);
the articulatory aspect (articulatory phonetics);
the functional aspect (phonology).
Phonology studies speech sounds in their functional, or social, aspect. Here what matters is not the physical quality of speech sounds, but their functions in the system of language.
From this point of view, speech sounds represent a way of materializing morphemes and word forms, which act as a unity of sound and meaning.
The multi-aspect nature of the speech sound has given rise to an ambiguity in the basic phonetic terms speech sound and phoneme.
Speech sound – is an acoustic phenomenon, an articulatory complex necessary for the pronunciation of a specific sound, a unit of the sound system of a language.
Phoneme – is the smallest unit of language; it has no meaning of its own and serves only to distinguish the sound shells of words. It is a sound unit of language, that is, a speech sound within the system of phonemes of a given language. The number of phonemes in a language is small; in any language of the world it is limited to a two-digit number.
The description of the units of the phonetic level began long ago, even before linguistics took shape as a science. By now, this level of the language system may be considered exhaustively described. As already noted, the characterization of the units of the phonetic level is the concern of phonetics (acoustic and articulatory) and phonology (functional phonetics).
The creator of the doctrine of the phoneme is Ivan Aleksandrovich Baudouin de Courtenay. He laid the foundations of phonology. His doctrine rests on two basic propositions:
a phoneme is a set of articulatory and acoustic representations;
phonemes in themselves have no meaning, but they too perform a meaning-distinguishing (significative) function.
The idea of the phoneme was taken up by other scholars. A representative of the Prague linguistic school, the Russian scholar Nikolai Sergeevich Trubetzkoy, wrote the book “Principles of Phonology” in 1939. From that moment phonology became a separate linguistic discipline.
For Nikolai Sergeevich Trubetzkoy and other scholars of the Prague linguistic school, the phoneme is a unit of opposition, capable of distinguishing morphemes or words.
The core of Trubetzkoy’s phonological conception is the meaning-distinguishing function of the phoneme. Sounds are united into phonemes not on the basis of articulatory or acoustic closeness, but on the basis of functional commonality. If, depending on their position in a word, sounds are pronounced differently but perform one and the same function, forming one and the same words, they are regarded as variants of one and the same phoneme. Consequently:
a phoneme is the shortest language unit, serving to distinguish the material shell of words and morphemes;
a phoneme is a complex sound unit, a set of various acoustic and articulatory properties, which manifests itself differently in the sound chain and performs the significative function differently.
The central concept of Nikolai Sergeevich Trubetzkoy’s doctrine is phonological oppositions, sound contrasts capable of differentiating the meanings of the words of a given language. For example, the opposition of consonants according to the feature of voiced/voiceless in Russian.
Phonological oppositions form the phonological systems of particular languages.
In all the languages of the world there are only 12 pairs of differential features (DF). Different pairs of DF are characteristic of different types of sounds. For example, height, backness, and labialization are characteristic of vowels. In different languages the pairs of DF differ; there exists a definite set of DF for the phonemes of a given national language. For example, in Russian the DF of length/shortness of vowels does not “work”, that is, it is not significant, whereas in English this feature distinguishes meanings, that is, it is significant, cf.:
Russian: voiced/voiceless, obstruent/sonorant, hard/soft, front-lingual/back-lingual;
English: long/short, labial/non-labial;
French: nasal/non-nasal, etc.
Each phoneme represents a bundle of differential features that distinguish phonemes from one another and contribute to the recognition of words and morphemes. Phonemes also have insignificant (non-integral) features, which are not used for differentiating the phonemes of a language.
The conditions under which phonemes are pronounced are called positions.
The concept of the phoneme is closely connected with the concept of position, that is, the position of a sound in a word or morpheme. A distinction is made between strong positions, in which the phoneme realizes all its differential features, and weak positions, in which some of these features are lost. The system of strong and weak positions in Russian can be represented as follows.
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P
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Vowels – stressed |
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Consonants – before vowels |
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Vowels – unstressed
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Consonants – at the absolute end of the word |
In a strong position a phoneme realizes all of its differential features; in a weak position it neutralizes (loses) some of them.
Phonemes occur in variants and variations.
Variation is a positional variety of one and the same phoneme (мир – жир, i.e. mir – zhir, ‘world’ – ‘fat’).
Variants are a general positional variety of different phonemes (роз – рос, i.e. roz – ros, ‘of roses’ – ‘grew’).
Only in strong positions is the system of phonemes of a given language revealed.
All the phonemes of a particular language form its phonological system, that is, they are interconnected, mutually conditioned and united by a common meaning-distinguishing function.
The phonetic systems of different languages differ in:
the number of phonemes (English – 44, Russian – 41, French – 35, German – 36);
the ratio of vowels to consonants (Russian – 6 vowels :: 35 consonants; English – 12 vowels :: 8 diphthongs :: 17 consonants; French – 18 vowels :: 17 consonants; German – 15 vowels :: 3 diphthongs :: 18 consonants);
specific laws of phoneme combinability in the flow of speech (in different languages (in Russian, despite the small number of vowel phonemes, their frequency of occurrence in speech makes up almost half of the phonemic composition).
The further development of the ideas of Ivan Aleksandrovich Baudouin de Courtenay and Nikolai Sergeevich Trubetzkoy in Russia led to the formation of the main phonological schools: the Moscow school (MPS) and the Leningrad school (LPS).
Representatives of the MPS (R.I. Avanesov, P.S. Kuznetsov, A.A. Reformatsky, V.N. Sidorov and others) regard the phoneme as the shortest sound unit, constituting an element of the sound shell of the meaningful units of language (lexemes and morphemes). The concept of position underlies the MPS conception, that is, the conditions of the use and realization of phonemes in speech (see above). Here a strong position is regarded as favourable for revealing the functions of phonemes, and a weak one as unfavourable. Phonemes perform two functions: recognition (perceptive) and distinction (significative). Depending on the function, completely different results will appear in one and the same weak positions: a perceptually weak position yields variations, while a significatively weak position yields variants.
The Leningrad Phonological School (LPS) (L.V. Shcherba, L.R. Zinder, N.I. Matusevich, and others) treats the phoneme as a sound type associated with concrete phonetic representations. In the view of the LPS, the phoneme is not only a bundle of differential features but a concrete sound unit.
The theoretical disagreements between the MPS and the LPS are connected precisely with this difference in the understanding of the phoneme. Thus, in the words дуб (‘oak’), роз (‘of roses’), пруд (‘pond’), etc., representatives of the first school will see variants of the phonemes [б] (b), [з] (z), [д] (d), whereas representatives of the second will see the phonemes [п] (p), [с] (s), [т] (t). From the standpoint of the MPS, the soft sounds [r‘], [k‘], [x‘] are not independent phonemes, since they never occur in the same positions as the corresponding hard sounds, whereas from the standpoint of the LPS these are phonemes acoustically distinct from the hard ones.
However, what these two phonological schools have in common in their views is that they
recognize the social nature of the phoneme;
rely on the connection between phonetics and phonology;
regard the phoneme as a unit of language;
proceed from the existence of the phonological system of a particular language and its historical variability.
Morphology and syntax are parts of grammar – the science of the grammatical structure of language, by which is meant:
the ways and means of changing lexical units (morphology);
the construction of sentences from lexical units in speech in accordance with the thought being expressed.
Morphology is the study of the grammatical form of the word and its structure. Morphology deals with the study of the units of the morphological level. It offers classifications of morphemes and describes their characteristics and the laws governing their functioning in language.
Syntax is the study of the rules of combinability of units in a sentence and of the relations between them. It studies the ways of constructing phrases and sentences.
Present-day tenets of grammatical theory have been strongly influenced by the Greco-Latin tradition, since ancient scholars made a great contribution to the development of grammatical problems.
Plato tried to classify the parts of speech on a logical basis; he distinguished the noun and the verb. The verb is what pertains to actions, the noun is the designation of the one performing that action.
Aristotle investigated the structure of the sentence. He held that a thought is expressed in a sentence. In addition, Aristotle analysed the parts of speech: the noun, the verb, and the conjunction. He introduced the notion of the case of the noun or verb, by which he meant the oblique forms of these parts of speech.
In the 2nd century BC, the Alexandrian grammatical school was founded in Ancient Greece, whose representatives include Aristarchus of Samothrace, Apollonius Dyscolus, and Dionysius Thrax. The Alexandrians defined the word as the smallest meaningful part of connected speech, and the sentence as a combination of words expressing a complete thought. This school worked out the doctrine of the parts of speech in detail. Dionysius distinguished 8 parts of speech: the noun, the verb, the adverb, the participle, the pronoun, the article, the preposition, and the conjunction. Apollonius studied the syntactic properties and functions of the parts of speech. But the Alexandrians had not yet arrived at an understanding of the need to analyse the morphological structure of the word.
Roman grammar generally followed the rules of Greek grammar, applying them to the analysis of the Latin language. The development of the grammar of the Latin language became very important in the Middle Ages, when Latin became the language of religion, science, and education.
In the 17th-18th century, works appeared in the field of the grammatical differences among European languages (English, French, German, Russian). Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov’s “Russian Grammar” appeared in 1757.
In the development of linguistic thought of the 17th century, a special place is occupied by the so-called “General and Rational Grammar”, or the Port-Royal Grammar, written by the abbots of the Port-Royal monastery A. Arnauld and C. Lancelot. The philosophical basis of this grammar is formed by the ideas of René Descartes, who emphasized the omnipotence of human reason, which must serve as the criterion of truth.
The aim of the Port-Royal Grammar was the study of the logical principles underlying all the languages of the world, i.e. the existence of language was examined from the standpoint of the capacity to express a logically correct thought. The authors proceeded from the identification of logical and linguistic categories and set themselves the task of identifying universal categories found in all languages.
Universal grammars, created on the material of different languages, are, in essence, an attempt to comprehend the structure of language.
Grammar as a linguistic science studies the form and content, the structure and the functioning of grammatical units and categories. The complex nature of grammatical units and categories has given rise to various approaches to their study. These approaches underlie the classification of types of grammars. The main types of grammars are:
formal grammar studies, above all, grammatical forms, their structure, their groupings by parts of speech and by the rules of inflection (paradigms), and their combinability (syntactic links). The basic units of grammar are the word-formation and inflectional model, the word form, and the phrase;
functional grammar studies the potential functions of language units and categories and their functioning within a single contemporary state of the language. Functional grammar is characterized by considering language units in the interaction of the grammatical and lexical units of the language within a schematic and an actual context;
Abstract-linguistic grammars are contrasted with speech, or communicative, grammars, in which the object of study is verbal communication, speech activity.
The totality of grammatical forms expressing identical or mutually opposed meanings constitutes a grammatical category. For example, all the cases together constitute the category of case. The sets of grammatical categories differ from language to language.
Grammatical form is the unity of a grammatical meaning and the grammatical means expressing that meaning. Grammatical forms are varieties of words which, while having one and the same lexical meaning, differ in grammatical meaning. Grammatical forms make up paradigms, which are a set of grammatical forms arranged in a certain order.
The vocabulary of a language is called lexis (Gr.: lexicos – pertaining to words, logos – study).
Lexicology is the branch of linguistics that studies the regularities characteristic of the entire vocabulary of a language, as well as the peculiarities of various groups of words. Since a word has many different sides, a whole series of branches of lexicology is distinguished.
Semasiology studies the meanings of words (the structure of meaning, semantic oppositions, semantic features, etc.).
Onomasiology studies the process of naming.
Onomastics deals with proper names. It is divided into anthroponymy (the study of personal names), toponymy (the study of geographical names), ethnonymy, etc.
Phraseology deals with set phrases.
Etymology deals with the origin of words.
Lexicography is the science of the methods of describing vocabulary and the principles of compiling dictionaries, etc.
Lexicology may be synchronic and diachronic (historical), as well as general and particular.
The totality of all the words of a language is its vocabulary (lexis). Developed languages have hundreds of thousands of words. V.I. Dal's dictionary contains 200,000 words, the Large Academic Dictionary (BAS) – 120 thousand, the Modern Dictionary of the Russian Language – 500 thousand. No single person uses all the words: within the vocabulary a basic stock of words is distinguished (words in active use). For a given individual, an active and a passive vocabulary are distinguished. A child's vocabulary comprises approx. 3 thousand words, an adolescent's – approx. 9 thousand words, and an adult's – 11-13 thousand.
The word is one of the basic units of language. Unlike other units, it possesses a nominative function – the function of naming.
Many definitions of the word can be formulated, but none of them can be exhaustive. All the definitions will differ depending on the aspect from which the word is viewed (for example, from the standpoint of graphics the word is a chain of graphemes between two spaces). In order to give a definition of the word, it is necessary to identify its basic features.
The word is:
a phonetic unity according to the laws of the phonetics of the given language;
a grammatical unity according to the laws of the grammar of the given language;
a meaningful unit of language possessing a nominative function;
it possesses positional autonomy (i.e. it is characterized by the absence of a rigid linear connection with neighbouring words, cf.: Today the weather is warm – The weather today is warm);
it possesses syntactic autonomy (i.e. the ability to receive the syntactic function of a sentence element or of a separate sentence).
Thus, the word is a phonetic, grammatical, and lexical unity. Note that the characteristics indicated represent different sides of the word from the standpoint of different levels of the system of language.
Not all words have the same ratio of these characteristics.
A working definition of the word can be given: it is the minimal relatively autonomous unit of language which has lexico-grammatical relatedness and is freely reproduced in speech for constructing an utterance.
The word as a unit of language (in the system) is called a lexeme. A lexeme is an “ideal word”. In speech we deal with allolexes (variant realizations of a single lexeme), or word forms, cf. Человек человеку друг (‘Man is a friend to man’; 3 words, but 2 lexemes).
Every word is a unity of sound and meaning. The connection between sound and meaning is arbitrary; it becomes fixed through social practice. The connection of language with the external world is manifested in the meaning of the word. However, lexicology describes words, not the objects of the surrounding world.
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M
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Grammatical (дом – a noun, masc., sing., …) |
Lexical meaning is what a given word denotes; this meaning correlates with a concept and assigns the word to a particular section of the lexico-semantic system of the language. Grammatical meaning is a word's membership in a particular grammatical category; it determines the combinability of the word and the ways in which it is modified.
The core of the lexical meaning is a mental reflection of a given phenomenon of reality, an object, or a class of objects. The object denoted by a word is called the denotatum.
Alexander Afanasyevich Potebnya spoke of the proximate and the further meaning of a word, and also pointed to the dialectical unity of the linguistic and extralinguistic content of a word.
A distinction is made between the denotative and the connotative meaning of a word. Denotative meanings may be concrete (dog, green), abstract (joy, honestly), or imaginary (mermaid). Connotative meaning consists of the emotional, expressive, evaluative, and stylistic characteristics of a word (cf.: dog – doggie).
Lexical meanings are concrete and individual, i.e. each lexical meaning belongs to a single word, but in relation to the object, each lexical meaning turns out to be generalized.
Lexical meanings are classified according to their relation to objects and phenomena of reality:
N
ominative (house, birch) signal (this, he)
D
irect (head, hand) figurative (time runs)
c
oncrete abstract
According to the nature of their reference to objects, meanings may be proper (individual/unique) and common (general).
Underlying lexical meaning is a concept: a generalized thought about a given object or phenomenon. Different types of words relate to the concept in different ways, although every concept can be expressed by a word or a phrase. But a word is not equal to a concept. A concept is a category of logic. It can be said that meaning is broader, while a concept is deeper. For example, one word may have several meanings, i.e. may correlate with several concepts; one concept may be designated by several words; a concept may be expressed by a compound designation.
The relation between sound and meaning arises by chance, but once it has arisen, it becomes obligatory for all speakers of the given language.
Lexical meaning may also contain an internal form (motivation, i.e. an indication of the reason why the given meaning came to be expressed by precisely this combination of sounds (for example, onomatopoeic words, or such words as луноход (‘lunar rover’, lit. ‘moon-walker’), самолет (‘airplane’, lit. ‘self-flyer’), etc.).
Not all words have retained their motivation. Each language has its own grounds for motivation. Cf.: подоконник (‘windowsill’), самолет (‘airplane’). Over time a word undergoes the process of de-etymologization (i.e. the loss of motivation; cf. капуста (‘cabbage’) from caput – ‘head’). When the motivation comes to be reinterpreted, a phenomenon arises known as false (folk) etymology; cf.: полуклиника (folk-reshaped from ‘поликлиника’ ‘polyclinic’), полувер, гусеница (‘pullover’ and ‘caterpillar’, both folk-reshaped forms), etc.
The entire vocabulary of a language may be viewed as a system whose structure is determined by the types of lexical meanings and the lexico-grammatical classes of words. Thus, all words can be distributed among the categories of parts of speech in accordance with their lexico-grammatical status. Depending on the relations of their lexical meaning, one may distinguish polysemantic words, homonyms, synonyms, antonyms, paronyms, etc. From the standpoint of language change, the lexical stock includes neologisms (words newly appeared in the language, resulting from various kinds of borrowing or from changes in the semantic structure of existing words – компьютер (‘computer’), дилер (‘dealer’)), historicisms (words naming realia that have fallen out of use – кольчуга (‘chainmail’), лапти (‘bast shoes’)), and archaisms (obsolete words – очи (‘eyes’), ланиты (‘cheeks’)).
The notion of the systemic nature of language and of its structure entered the science of language at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries. In this, linguistics reflected, to some extent, the general tendency in the formation of scientific knowledge (cf. the emergence of ideas about systematicity in other sciences: Charles Darwin's theory of the origin of species, Dmitri Mendeleev's system of chemical elements, etc.).
It should be added that the system of language is in a process of constant change. However, different levels of language change differently, both qualitatively and quantitatively. The lexical level turns out to be the most mobile: new words and new meanings appear, some words fall out of use, and so on.
Thus, the system of language, on the one hand, tends toward change, while on the other hand it must preserve its integrity, otherwise language will cease to perform its functions, since people will cease to understand one another. These are two opposite processes acting on the system, which is why it is customary to say that the system of language is always in a state of relative equilibrium.
Why do you think people moved from merely understanding the connections between objects and phenomena of the surrounding reality to describing these connections in accordance with the principle of systematicity specifically in the 19th century?
What examples of systemic description from other sciences can you give?
Why is it said that language is a “system of systems”?
A. Depict the system of language in the form of a diagram. Try to show on this diagram all the types of relations between the units of language.
B. Solve the problem.
Given the sentences
The elephant amazes everyone with its big ears.
He drove the car along a dusty road.
I knew her as a little boy.
He read a book on a warm evening.
The rocket pierced the clouds with black lightning.
He dug up the garden bed with a sharp spade
I knew him as a little boy.
I considered him a complete fool.
He left Kursk on the evening train.
In these sentences the instrumental case of the final noun has different meanings. To find out this difference, it is enough to recast (transform) the given sentences so that their meaning is preserved, but instead of the instrumental-case construction they contain some other grammatical construction (it is permitted to transform the whole sentence, not only the instrumental-case phrase).
By means of such transformations, try to distinguish from one another as many (all?) of these sentences as possible.
Make up your own sentences for a similar assignment.
C. Solve the problem.
Given the words тоже (‘also’) and также (‘also, likewise’). Find: a) a sentence with the word тоже in which тоже cannot be replaced by также (the sentence would become incorrect); b) a sentence in which также cannot be replaced by тоже; c) a sentence in which these words are interchangeable.
D. Comment on the statement by Jean Aitchison. What does the author want to draw our attention to?
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“…the meanings of words are not dead bugs that can be pinned down with pins, but living butterflies fluttering around us, or fish slipping out of your hands just when you think you have caught them.” Jean Aitchison |
ositions
Strong
Weak
eaning
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