Psycholinguistics and World Image

We have already said above that in psychology, the notion of a subject meaning, which has been developed (sometimes under other names) by many major modern psychologists - from L. S. Vygotsky to J. Bruner and K. Holzkamp, ​​the leader of West German Marxist psychology, is becoming increasingly popular. This concept is now gaining new life in connection with the intensification of research on the functional asymmetry of the cerebral hemispheres. The continuity of the subject value with verbal (for all their psychological specifics) is obvious, and the problematics of cognitive psycholinguistics is becoming increasingly oriented not only and not so much on verbal, but on subject values, setting the task of synthesizing the psycholinguistic theory of the word (sign) and the psychological theory of a meaningful image. If, following A. N. Leont'ev (A. N. Leont'ev, 1983), to introduce the notion of the image of the world, then the objective meanings are the “building blocks” from which this image is built.

The image of the world, as it is understood today by psychologists, is a display in the human psyche of the objective world, mediated by objective values ​​and corresponding cognitive schemes and amenable to conscious reflection.

The world is presented to an individual through a system of object meanings, as if imposed on the perception of this world. Man does not “nominate” the sensual images of objects — objective values ​​are the components of these images, that which cements them for a person, that which makes possible the very existence of these images.

The most immediate situation of meeting a person with the world is the incessant movement of consciousness in the actually perceived image of the world. Each of us, perceiving the world through the image of the world, constantly transfers the bright field of attention from one object to another. Thus, in our image of the world, or rather in that situational fragment, with which we are currently dealing, a separate subject is “highlighted” all the time, and then attention and consciousness switches to another - and so without end. But this continuous switching of consciousness from one object to another simultaneously implies the transition of an object (its marked image) from one level of awareness to another. In my mind coexists that which is the object of actual awareness, and that which is at the level of conscious control. Thus, the movement of consciousness in the image of the world is not planimetric, but stereometric. Consciousness has depth. The image of the world is multidimensional, as the world itself is multidimensional.

But the image of the world may not be included in the direct perception of the world, but rather fully reflective, separated from our action in the world, in particular perception. Such an image of the world can be situational, that is, fragmentary, for example, this may be the case when memory or imagination work. But it can be extra-creative, global: then it is an image of the whole world, a kind of scheme of the universe. Such an image of the world in its own sense is always conscious, reflexive, but the depth of its understanding, the level of reflection can be different. The ultimate level of such reflection corresponds to the scientific and philosophical understanding of the world.

If in the first case we are dealing with the immediate consciousness of the world, then in the second it is a theoretical consciousness of a different kind, free from connection with real perception.

One of the first who clearly expressed their difference was Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin. This is his famous concept of the “big” and “small” world.

“The world where a deed really takes place, an act is being accomplished is a single and only world that is concretely experienced: visible, audible, tangible and imaginable, all imbued with emotional and volitional tones of established holistic significance ....

... In relation to my only place of active emergence in the world, all conceivable spatial and temporal relations acquire a value center, are built around it into some sustainable concrete architectonic whole — possible unity becomes real uniqueness ...

If I digress from this center of the origin of my only involvement in being, not only from its substantive definiteness (space-time, etc.), but also from its emotional-volitional assertion, the concrete uniqueness and tedious reality of the world will inevitably decompose to abstract-general, only possible moments and relationships that can be reduced to the same only possible, abstract-general unity. The specific architectonics of the experienced world will be replaced by non-temporal and non-spatial, and non-value systematic unity of abstract-general moments ... ”(Bakhtin, 1986, P.511-512).

And then - about the “big” and “small” experience: “In the“ small ”experience there is one knowing (all the rest is the object of knowledge), one free subject (all the rest are dead things), one alive and unclosed (all the rest is dead). and closed), one says (everything else is silent, silent).

In big experience everything is alive, everything says, this experience is deeply and essentially dialogic. The thought of the world about me thinking, rather, I am an object in the subject world ... "(ibid, pp.519-520).

This being-person-in-the-world as its component, being in continuous dialogue with this world, suggests, in the words of A.N. Leontiev, “... return to building in the mind of an individual an image of the external multidimensional world, the world as it is in which we live, in which we operate, but in which our abstractions themselves do not "inhabit" ... "(A.N. Leontiev, 1983, p.255).

These words were not published during Leontyev’s life, although they were voiced in his report at the Faculty of Psychology of Moscow State University in 1975. And even more so, his thoughts relating to the 1930s - early 1940s could not be published. He wrote (for himself): consciousness and reality "go into each other", "are identical." And: “The actual opposition is the opposite of the image and process, indifferently of the internal or external, and not at all the opposite of consciousness, as internal, objective world, as external” (A.N. Leontiev, 1994, p.43).

But let us return to the Bakhtin idea of ​​the dialogue between man and the world. Its roots can be seen in the early works of O. Paul Florensky. It is to him that the thesis about the psyche as a kind of continuation of the objective world in the head of a person belongs. “... The act of knowledge is an act not only epistemological, but also ontological, not only perfect, but also real. Knowledge is the real emergence of the knower from oneself, or, which is the same, the real entry of the knowable into the knower, is the real unity of the knower and the knowable ... Knowledge is not the seizure of a dead object by a predatory gnoseological subject, but a lively moral intercourse of personalities, of which each each serves as an object and a subject. In the proper sense, only a person is knowable and only a person ... In other words, essential knowledge, understood as an act of the knowing subject, and essential truth, understood as a knowable real object, are both the same, although they differ in abstract reason "(Florensky, 1990, p.73-74).

The world “is happening” (if you use the words of M. K. Mamardashvili) not outside of us, not independently of us. We are participants of this "event". We are part of this world, in constant communication with its other parts. And without our thought, our reflection of the world, our action in the world, the world will be another world.

Language is the system of reference points necessary for activity in this material and social, in a word - subject, world. Do we use this system for our own orientation, or do we provide the orientation of other people with its help? The question is not so fundamental. After all, communication, communication is first and foremost nothing more than a way of making a correction in the image of the interlocutor’s world (situational, fragmentary and at the same time immediate, that is, the image of the “big” world, or global, but turned off from real activities and real experiences of this world, ie, the image of the “small” world, the world of abstractions). Accordingly, the assimilation of a new language is a transition to a new image of the world, necessary for mutual understanding and cooperation with the speakers of this other language and another culture. For language to serve as a means of communication, there must be a single or similar understanding of reality behind it. And vice versa: the unity of understanding of reality and the unity and consistency of actions in it have as their premise the possibility of adequate communication.

So far we have remained within the limits of an individual-personal vision of the world by man, mediated by personal-sense formations and, first of all, by personal meanings as such (see Chapter 18 in this connection). But along with flowing, individual characteristics, these personal-semantic formations also have a certain cultural “core”, common to all members of a social group or community and fixed in the concept of meaning as opposed to personal meaning. In other words, it is possible, along with individual options, to talk about a system of invariant images of the world, more precisely, abstract models that describe common features in the vision of the world by different people. Such an invariant image of the world is directly correlated with meanings and other socially developed supports, and not with personality-sense formations as such.

From a theoretical point of view, such invariant images of the world can be any number — it all depends on the social structure of society, cultural and linguistic differences in it, etc. Recently, even the notion of “professional image of the world” has emerged, the formation of which is one of the tasks of teaching a specialty. In general, the learning process can be understood as the process of forming an invariant image of the world that is socially and cognitively adequate to the realities of this world and can serve as an indicative basis for effective human activity in it.

Anyway, our knowledge of the world is inseparable from our activities in the world, our dialogue with the world, ours, using the expression of M. M. Bakhtin, “non-alibi in it”. In psychology, there is data that is not only not contrary to this position, but also directly confirms it. This, in particular, is the conclusion of B. M. Velichkovsky that “semantic information can be stored in memory in the form of spatial and semantic contexts nested into each other. Thanks to this form of organization, it is obvious that the colossal density of the information is ensured. In addition, depending on the situation, this form of presentation can demonstrate both the effects of hierarchical organization characteristic of semantic networks and the classical effects of associative proximity and contrast, which are most easily interpreted within the framework of spatial models of semantic memory ”(Velichkovsky, 1987, p.27) . This refers to such conceptual structures as scene outlines (frames) and event outlines (scripts or scripts). BM Velichkovsky introduces in this connection the concept of a "quasi-spatial representation of a situation." The similar idea of ​​“rescue”, that is, the transformation of mental entities into the form of spatial representations, was expressed much earlier by the well-known French linguist Gustave Guillaume (Guillaume, 1990; Skrelina, 1981).

Apparently, the difference in speech and cognitive functions of the left and right hemispheres of the brain is correlated precisely with the difference in the “network” and event-based presentation, storage and use of information by a person. We cite one of the most recent studies of this problem, which gives a good summary of the results obtained in the studies of the last thirty years.

“Among the characteristics attributed to the mechanisms of the left hemisphere, we can list the following ...: identification and classification of words, perception of quasi-words, providing a structural-classification approach, relying on the actual linguistic connections in the processing of lexical material. The following functions are attributed to the right hemisphere: identification of words based on their perceptual rather than phonemic signs, recognition of handwritten words, understanding of words in the language of the deaf, identification of hieroglyphs, preferred identification of specific words, when processing lexical material, the orientation is not on the actual linguistic characteristics, but on behind the words denotation, images are positively or negatively emotionally colored. The features of the right hemisphere are characterized by features of the deep structures that are related to ontogenesis (that is, the earliest stages of speech generation), and those of the functions of the left are surface features (finalized in grammatical and phonological-logical statements). The left hemisphere has all the means to generate statements of any complexity: actualization of the valences of words, inflection, word formation, the possibility of syntactic structuring of statements, that is, the layer of vocabulary that is necessary for the formation of complex grammatical structures - verbs, formal grammatical and replacement words. With the functions of the left hemisphere associated conceptual generated texts. The scope of the functions of the right hemisphere is the content of perceived and generated statements with specific subject content: nominal vocabulary, a reflection of individual personal experience, sensual impressions. It is shown that in the analysis of lexical and grammatical material, software does not rely on system relations in the language, but on the reference for words and on the position of the name for phrases. The language of PP is concrete and imaginative: its vocabulary is objective, “real”, it reflects immediate sensory impressions; its structure is elementary, almost asyntax; it is illogical, not differentiated and serves as the basis for guesswork and intuition. The LP language is distinguished by a developed and complex syntactic structure; he is capable of generalizations, abstractions, construction of judgments, having for this an abundance of formal grammatical means. The physiological mechanisms of both hemispheres provide different sides of speech activity, rather than duplicating each other. The participation of the hemispheres in the organization of speech function is carried out by their constant and flexible interaction, providing an opportunity to create a holistic sensual image of the world ”(Lyakh, 1996, p.6-7; see also Chernigovskaya and Deglin, 1984). TV Chernigovskaya adds to this: “In contrast to the data obtained by other authors on healthy subjects and on patients with aphasia, our studies indicate the presence of not one, but two hierarchies of grammar complexity — right and left hemisphere” (Chernigovskaya, 1993, p. 29).

We know only one cycle of works in modern psycholinguistics, fully responding to the above idea of ​​the interaction of two forms of cognitive representation and the just quoted thought of the interaction of the right and left hemispheres in building the image of the world. These are the books of the St. Petersburg psycholinguist Vladimir Yakovlevich Shabes (1989; 1990; 1992). He built his concept on the basis of the idea of ​​"... models of mental representations of various types", concepts of pre-existence - end-event-post-event, etc. Naturally, it is impossible to describe this concept here, and we will simply refer the reader to the specified works.

Psycholinguistic events (or the "right-hemisphere" approach).

In any case, psycholinguistics has long been going in the direction of modeling the situational interaction of man and the world, in the direction of building “event psycholinguistics” or “activity psycholinguistics”. For example, within the framework of cognitive psycholinguistics, the theory of scripts (scenarios) and scenes is developed (Schank and Abelson, 1977; Schank, 1982; Shabez, 1992, c.46-58). Even before the emergence of psycholinguistics (and even more so, neurolinguistics) as a special science, A. R. Luria discovered differences in the speech activities of aphatiques depending on whether they operate with “event communication” (like Dog bark) or “relationship communication” (like Socrates - person). Within the framework of psycholinguistics, as we saw above, the idea of ​​“pre-lingual” cognitive structures (propositions) was also defined, the handling of which is an organic part of speech-generating processes. Similar tendencies are noticeable in the interpretation of the child’s speech-or, more precisely, speech-thinking development.

In the light of what has been shown, it is interesting to pose a question that, as far as we know, has not yet been the subject of a psycholinguistic consideration from the point of view of “event psycholinguistics” (or “right-hemisphere” approach). It is about the status of grammatical meanings in a broad sense, i.e. the substantive side of what V. V was at one time, Vinogradov considered as sentence categories and what is being actualized or “morphologized” (S.I. Bernstein) in the proper grammatical (morphological) categories. This includes various kinds of phenomena of the locus and deixis. In a word, these are categories related to spatial, temporal and other “event-based” concretization of speech utterances. Sequential consideration of these categories as psycholinguistic can not but have an impact on the conceptual system and the main provisions of "pure" linguistics.

Ведь, как автор этой книги писал двадцать лет назад, психолингвистика и есть экспериментальная лингвистика. И как бы лингвистика ни делала вид, что она независима от психолингвистики и может прожить без нее, они давно уже настолько спаяны друг с другом, что любой серьезный шаг вперед в одной немедленно отражается на другой.

А лингвистика сейчас остро нуждается в притоке новых идей, так как она уже много лет по существу топчется на месте, развиваясь почти исключительно за счет использования информации, накопленной в психолингвистике, логике, прагматике и других гуманитарных областях.

Психолингвистика и личность

В предыдущей главе мы обращались к мыслям М. М. Бахтина, П. А. Флоренского и А. Н. Леонтьева о принципиальном единстве мира предметного и мира духовного, мира сознания, о «не-алиби» каждого человека в мире и о том, что мир неполон без каждого из нас, что без каждого из нас с нашей психикой, нашим сознанием, нашей деятельностью он становится другим миром.

Мы зафиксировали также, что главное противопоставление для психолога есть не противопоставление внешнего и внутреннего, материального и психического, а противопоставление образа и процесса.

В концептуальной системе школы Л. С. Выготского речь идет об образе мира и деятельности человека в этом мире. Простейшее, в конечном счете механистическое представление об их взаимоотношении сводится к тривиальному положению о том, что образ мира есть ориентировочная основа для деятельности. (Для простоты и мы в Главе 17 рассуждали именно так).

Но образ мира связан с деятельностью не только, так сказать, операциональными связями. Нельзя забывать, что «строительным материалом» для образа мира являются не безличные социализованные значения, а личностные смыслы как кристаллизация человеческого отношения к миру (А. Н. Леонтьев). А с другой стороны, у любого акта деятельности есть мотивационная детерминация, есть иерархия управляющих ею установок (А. Г. Асмолов). Да и вообще деятельность может формироваться и направляться надситуативной активностью субъекта (В. А. Петровский).

Таким образом, между образом мира (если понимать его как часть сознания личности, по выражению А. Н. Леонтьева) и реальными поступками человека стоит - личность. «Она и есть не что иное, как сгусток жизни, продукт ее кристаллизации в форме субъекта - субъекта, всегда несущего в себе свою историю, свою реальную биографию» (А. Н. Леонтьев, 1994, с.200).

Проблему личности можно и нужно рассматривать под двумя углами зрения, в сущности своей неразрывными. Это, во-первых, механизм такой кристаллизации, внутренняя структура личности как психологического образования. По мнению Д. А. Леонтьева, «...структурными составляющими личности выступают следующие смысловые структуры: личностный смысл...; смысловая установка...; мотив...; смысловая диспозиция, проявляющаяся в эффектах консервации устойчивого смыслового отношения («перенос смысла» по А. Н. Леонтьеву - Авт.), смысловой конструкт, проявляющийся в эффектах приписывания жизненного смысла объекту или явлению, выступающему носителем значимых качеств; личностная ценность, проявляющаяся в эффектах смыслообразования, связанного не с актуальной динамикой потребностей, а с идеальной моделью должного» (Д. А. Леонтьев, 1988, с.22; см. также 1993).

Во-вторых (и это отражается и в самой структуре личности), это отношение личности и «жизни», которое следует рассматривать и в плане формирования личности (персоногенеза) (см. Асмолов, 1996; 19960), и в плане отображения жизненной перспективы в сознании этой личности. А. Н. Леонтьеву (1975) принадлежит важнейшая идея «горизонта личности» как ее интегральной характеристики. Процитируем по А. А. Леонтьев, 1983, с.37- 38) рукописные подготовительные материалы к неосуществившейся книге А. Н. Леонтьева «Образ мира» (СНОСКА: В цитате не показаны сокращения):

«РАСШИРЯЮЩЕЕСЯ ПРОСТРАНСТВО: поле активно воспринятое поле воспроизведенное поле представления (воображаемое) = до планетарного и космического Оно уже не мое, а человеческое!

РАСШИРЯЮЩЕЕСЯ ВРЕМЯ: будущее: перспектива - планируемое биографическое «постбиографическое», конкретное (дети, внуки) историческое (общественное) прошлое: биографическое «предбиографическое» историческое (общественное).

Это все равно = «СЕЙЧАС»: Не локализованное.

Локализованное в биографическом. Локализованное в историческом (общественном)».

Л. С. Выготскому принадлежит идея «смыслового поля» личности, в дальнейшем (у А. Н. Леонтьева) выступившая в форме положения о смысловой природе образа мира (СНОСКА: История развития идеи смыслового поля личности пока не написана). Развитие психики в филогенезе и есть последовательное усложнение отношений человека и мира, формирование другого, нового типа их взаимодействия и взаимообусловленности, где эти отношения опосредуются не только и не столько сознанием и действием, как мы привыкли думать, сколько личностью и деянием, поступком.

Человек входит в мир деянием, личностно опосредованной системой поступков, определяющей развитие его личности и формирующей сам мир. И психология должна осознать, что вместо «науки о бесконечно меняющемся человеке в бесконечно меняющемся мире, ... науки о деянии свободной творческой личности», она стала наукой «о деятельности ограниченного и ригидного сознания» (А. А. Леонтьев, 1990, с. 13).

Такой наукой оказалась и ее важная составная часть - психолингвистика. Естественно, говоря о психолингвистике, мы здесь имеем в виду не традиционное «операционалистское» ее понимание, а то расширенное понимание, которое отразилось в настоящей книге (см. определение предмета психолингвистики в Главе 1).

Язык, как уже говорилось выше, есть важнейший ориентир человека при его деятельности в мире. И если эту деятельность понимать как глубокий, осмысленный диалог человека с миром, как многоголосное, иногда унисонное, иногда полемическое общение различных компонентов той колоссальной системы, которую мы называем миром, то язык есть прежде всего язык личности.

Творческий характер речевого акта.

Мы снова возвращаемся - на новом витке развития - к идеям К. Фосслера и Бенедетто Кроче, а в определенном смысле к В. Гумбольдту и А. А. Потебне, писавшим о творческом характере языка и речевого акта.

Это не просто декларация, потому что все более органично входящее в теоретическую и прикладную психолингвистику представление о личностно детерминированных стратегиях речевого общения и овладения языком, о языке как смысловом, а не только «значенческом» феномене (не говоря уже о том, что он никак не может быть сведен к системе операторов), предполагает в конечном счете именно такой подход.

Один из интереснейших психологов современности, Виктор Франкл, сказал в своей основной книге: «Если человек хочет прийти к самому себе, его путь лежит через мир» (Франкл, 1990, с.120).

Язык и есть его путеводитель по этому миру по дороге к себе.