NOTION OF CULTURAL CONCEPT

1. Notion of concept, conceptology.

2. Cultural concept, nature and essence

Questions for self-examination:

1. What is concept, conceptology?

2. Define the notion of cultural concept.

3. Give an example of cultural concept. Characterize it.

4. Give a linguaculturological description of concept “N”(proverbs).

By the end of the 20th century a new scientific paradigm apeared in linguistics. Scientists focused their attention on the speaking person instead of just isolated language forms, thus the problem of correlation between peoples and their languages was regarded of crucial importance.

The new paradigm, based on a multidimensional character of a phenomenon known as language, raised new aims in language investigation, demanded new methods of its description and analysis of its forms.

Special attention was paid to correlation between languages, cultural peculiarities and national mentalities. This idea became a foundation for a new direction of linguistics – LC, with concept as its main category. The appearance of this new term, mostly interpreted as a mental lump marked with LC specificity, became an appropriate step to the developing of the anthropocentric paradigm in linguistics.

Though, being used pretty often, like all complicated social phenomena, concept has no exact definition, but we understand it as a multidimensional lump which actually is the foundation of any language, creating abstract images of words, projecting models from human consciousness. The more scientists study the problem of concept definition, the more opinions appear on this topic, and the more approaches to investigating concept are being developed day by day.

Describing a concept is not an easy task as lots of aspects should be taken into consideration such as:

• LC aspect (bearing in mind linguistic peculiarities of a certain nationality);

• Cultural aspect (taking into account cultural peculiarities of different nations);

• Historical aspect (considering historical peculiarities of the development of national consciousness, ethnic experience);

• Social aspect (reflecting some social realms, public ideology);

• Psychological aspect (taking into account individual character features, human thoughts and individual experience).

According to all these aspects it becomes possible to single out three most popular methodologies of concept description:

1) The Method of conceptual analysis. It is based on LC, historical and cultural aspects and directed to studying concepts through the semantic structure of words, regarded as cultural phenomena with their history. This principle is built up upon the idea that creating a full image of a concept demands not just description of its ethimology. We should also compare its historical meanings to the semantic ones, in order to open all the hidden metamorphosis going on within the word, thus it becomes possible to observe the history of human thinking through time. This method includes: Structuring of concepts and cultural description of each its element.

2) Methodology of Cognitive Linguistics. Being based upon psychological and social aspects mostly, this method is directed to studying the words in their connection with human thoughts, reflecting people’s mentality and ideology. Its aim is to study meanings of the words and word combinations, reflecting this or that concept in the national language, also presenting parts of the language system representing a particular concept. The main means of this very methodology are:

- defining the word, conveying the concept;

- analysis of its semantic meaning through dictionary articles

- analysis of its lexical combinatory with other words

- creating a phraseological field of the word

- contextual analysis of the word

- Analysis of its verbal usage

- Interviewing

3) Methodology of Contrast linguistics. This methodology is based on LC aspect and built up on a principle that only; looking into a mirror of another language one can notice such features of the mother language concept, which could slip away from his attention; to reveal exactly the national specificity of the native language, and as a result to see the difference between the concept and the meaning of the word. All these differences are interpreted as cognitive differences of the concepts they express in different national concept-spheres. This methodology can be briefly described in the folowing way:

1step – Singling out a lexical group in the initial language

2 step – Discovering interlingual equivalents

3 step – Describing contrast pares

4 step – Pointing nationally inimitable meanings out

5 step – Differentiation and systematization of contrast pares

To sum all this information up, we can come to the conclusion that all of these methodologies are applicable for investigating and describing concepts. However to my mind the most appropriate methodology should be based upon all the necessary aspects (LC, cultural, social, historical and psychological), that is why it should be admitted that there doesn’t exist an ideal methodology of description of concepts, as none of the enumerated methodologies correspond the necessary aspects. Thus the problem remains unsolved, giving the scientists a vast field to explore.

At the present time the concept is the key notion of cognitive linguistics.

Y.S. Stepanov defines the concept as follows: “The concept – is like a bunch of culture in human consciousness in the form of what culture is a mental world of man. And, on the other hand, the concept – is that by which a person – ordinary person, not “the creator of cultural values” – himself enters in the culture, and in some cases affects it.

S.A. Askoldov, who one of the first referred to the study of concepts, considered the concept “mental entity that replaces in the mental activity a lot of objects of the same kind.” He further said that “one should not, of course, think that the concept is always a replacement of real objects, it may be the replacement of different kinds.”

G.G. Slyshkin and V. I. Karasik understand the concept as “a multidimensional mental unit with a dominant value element.” Concept groups around some “strong” point of consciousness, from which associative vectors diverge. The most relevant associations for native speakers are the nuclear of concept, the less significant – the periphery.

According to their view the concept hasn’t clear boundaries. Language or speech units, which updated the central point of the concept, are the name of the concept. Concept characterized by a set of “entrances”, i.e. units of speech and language with which this concept is actualized in the mind of its informant. Entrances to the concept may relate to different levels of language. To appeal to one and the same concept lexemes, idioms, free combinations, suggestions, and texts are used.

Z.D. Popova and I.A. Sternin define the concept as a complex mental entity which is in the process of mental activity turns the different sides actualizing in the process of thinking its different signs and layers; appropriate signs or layers of the concept may not have the linguistic symbols in native language. Concept are represented in language with ready lexemes from the lexical-phraseological language system, free phrases, structural and positional diagrams bringing model propositions (syntactic concepts), the text and the set of texts.

Concepts can be stable – have ascribed to them linguistic means of verbalization, and unstable – don’t have assigned to them verbalization, yet emerging, deeply personal, rarely, or almost not verbalized. The presence of a linguistic expression for the concept, its regular verbalization support the concept stability, steady state, make it well known (because the meanings of words, which is transmitted, are well known, they are interpreted by native speakers, recognized in the dictionaries).

The authors propose the following model of the concept: a sensual base image is the nuclear of the concept, acting as a universal way of encoding the object code. This image belongs to the everyday layer of consciousness and according to some observations, has an operational or substantive nature, based on biodynamic and sensuous fabric of consciousness. Base image is surrounded with a concrete sense by its origin the cognitive layer, which reflects the sensual perceived properties, attributes of the object. This layer together with the base layer refers to the everyday layer of consciousness. Further in the structure of the concept (although not all concepts) are allocated more abstract layers, reflecting a certain stage of everyday signs related to the reflective layer of consciousness.

Finally, the interpretative field of concept, which includes the evaluation of the content, interpreting some cognitive signs and forming the national consciousness arising from the contents of the concept the advice about comprehension of reality, may be associated with the spiritual level of consciousness, which involves a broad sense, an assessment of the concept in terms of its value to the nation.

Conceptology is understood as the branch of Cognitive Linguistics that focuses on the study of concepts. Initially ‘concept’ was used synonymously or associated with ‘notion’, ‘element of the meaning’, ‘consciousness’, ‘perception’, and ‘mind’; it was emphasized that concepts contain culturally-specific information.

The complexity of the concept as the object of research and its dual nature – mental and verbal – led to many definitions of the notion. On the one hand, scholars view a concept as the set of some elements, units while, and on the other hand, many scientists underlie unity, integrity of a concept. Some of the mostly cited definitions of concepts provided by the Russian linguists are the following: ‘operational units of human mind’ (E.Kubryakova), ‘fixed meaning in human mind’ (N.Boldyrev), ‘discrete substantial essence of consciousness’ (N.Nikitin).

From the lingua-culturological perspective concepts are The home concept as the set of meanings in poetic text viewed as the main pillars of culture in human mental world (Yu.Stepanov).

According to J.Searle “the frame for any word concept is going to be infinitely complex” (Searle, 1979: 127). R.Langacker makes a similar observation that “a concept must be characterized as an integrated system” (Langacker, 1999: 20). These definitions call for three remarks. Firstly, concepts and meanings are interrelated. Secondly, concepts contain culturally-specific information. Thirdly, concepts are understood as complex systems.

Considering the specificity of the cultural concept, it should be based on the following assumptions of the theory the relationship between language and culture.

1. The cultural concept - it is a point of intersection between the worlds of culture and the world of individual meanings is "clot culture in the minds of people and that by which man himself is a culture" from other positions concept - the content of the concepts and compressed history of the concept (Stepanov, 1997 : 40 , 42) .

2. Cultural concepts are the distinctive cultural genes belonging to the genotype of culture.

3. Cultural concepts essentially anthropocentric and therefore are saturated cultural connotations.

Model of semantic structuring of language is thus not a network model of propositions and the spatial “lattice” formed by the national language combinatory basic concepts of culture. That is, in our view, the specific language interpretation picture of the world and turns it into a proper linguistic picture of the world.

Of particular interest for LC is an attempt to highlight the ethno- cultural component of the concept. It is believed that even universal, human, concepts in different languages verbalized specific (depending on the linguistic, pragmatic and cultural) factors. Here the emphasis is on the fact that cultural concepts are organized in ethno-marked associative semantic network.

For an adequate understanding of the problem must address the problem of the relation of the cultural concept and meaning. Cognitive space or conceptual sphere is formed in a certain way a structured set of concepts. The relationship of concepts and system of linguistic signs interpreted by scholars in different ways: some claim that all concepts are linguistic objectification, others allow their parallel existence, and others argue that one part of the concept represented by a system of linguistic signs (tokens, prosody, tonic configurations tokens structures etc.), the other part of it is a language of expression.

LECTURE 12