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The article deals with the concept of Europe in Russian. Tah analysis is performed on the basis of dictionaries, the Russian National Corpus, the legal and philosophical discourse, media and everyday conversations. A scrutiny of dictionaries reveals the cultural component in the figurative understanding of the name of the continent. Questionnaires have shown that young Russian speakers associate Europe with economically developed Western countries: Germany, France, Britain, Italy. An analysis of the RNC shows that within the concept of Europe, originally the notion of “education” was formed, which then gave way to the notion of “culture”. Slavophiles and Westerners, in their philosophical discourse of the 19th c., formulated contrasting assessments of Europe, found in metaphors of Europe and Russia in the language of media and everyday usage.
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The Russian concept of čest’, originally associated with remuneration for services to one’s feudal lord, used to contrast with the spiritual understanding of slava. With time, differences between the two concepts became obliterated: in Classicism they functioned as synonyms, in the Enlightenment čest’ was associated with the era in decline.With these differences in mind, the author analyzes the Teshen archive, asks how Russian peasants protect their “čest’”, and where they see it lacking. It is observed that the notion of čest’ is captured in a series of rules that constitute a peculiar unwritten code. In the context of interacting with guests, čest’ is connected with a certain order of inviting and receiving them, the giving of gift, entertaining and seating one’s guests behind the table. Proverbs also reveal a clear link between čest’ and volya (will) as another important concept of traditional Russian culture (cf. Gostyu čest’, koli volya est’ ‘Respect to the guest, if there’s a will’).Čest’ is actualized during each ceremonial reception: it involves material aspects, such as an honorable place behind the table or special food, as well as aspects of behaviour, such as inviting and welcoming the guests, respect towards them and the appropriate course of events during a ceremonial meal. The hosts demonstrate their generosity and kindness. The guests should accepts the gifts offered in order to show čest’ to their gift-givers.
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The article analyzes the drastic change in the hierarchy of values in the modern Russian society after the falsification of the Parliament elections in December 2011 and afterwards. In the oppositional discourse the traditional civil values (freedom, honour and honesty, patriotism, justice, etc.) turned into very topical ones and became explicit in the unprecedented creative activity of the riots. The semantics and pragmatics, as well as quasi-synonyms of ‘honesty’ exploited by the opposition are thoroughly scrutinized. The author argues that the flow of time changes hierarchy of values as it is being constructed in the regime of a dialogue and depends a lot on the governmental discourse. Being an universal notion, each civil value is represented by a specific profile.
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The article aims to reconstruct the Polish concept of Europa (Europe) according to the EUROJOS methodology and on the basis of three sources of data: the language system, texts and questionnaires. Indirectly, it also aims to consider several notions and procedures of ethnolinguistic reconstruction, especially the changeability (or “variantability”) of the basic concept (here: Europa) relative to the various discourses in contemporary Polish public sphere.The authors present the concept of Europa as it emerges from the systemic (mainly lexicographic) and textual data analyzed in earlier studies of various scholars, but mainly concentrate on the results of three questionnaires from 1990, 2000 and 2010. The statistics derived from the questionnaires are juxtaposed with those of the systemic and textual data. By analyzing questionnaires, it is possible to render the content of the basic concept more specific: subjects’ responses reveal connotations not yet included in dictionaries, as well as relative ranks of the features attributed to a given (mental) object.
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The article deals with the representation of the concept of Europe in contemporary Ukrainian texts. The data are drawn from the media (including the “new media”) and supplemented with questionnaires administered to students (the question asked was: “What is the ‘true’ Europe?”). The concept of Europe is linked with norms and values, it is sensitive to the socio-cultural context, as can especially be seen in the time of radical social changes. In this way, the dynamics of the changes in conceptualization (intra-linguistic variability) can be observed. However, conceptualizations are subjected to correction and regulation, as is the case with the metaphorical “teacher – student” schema in portrayals of the relationship between Europe and Ukraine, the presentation of Europe as a pattern to follow, etc. A modification of the model in effect signifies a change, but the change is not arbitrary: it is concordant with a specific cognitive frame and the new socio-cultural context.
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The slogan of the French revolution, Liberté, ègalité, fraternité, is in Slavic languages categorized in a variety of ways: as a revolutionary triad, a list of basic values, non-material goods, key concepts, ideas, rights or goals, as a socio-political doctrine, an admonition, motto, programme, slogan or appeal. In this article, it is proposed that it be treated as a collection in the sense of Lublin cognitive ethnolinguistics, more specifically as a “collection of values”. Discussed are rare cases of quoting the original untranslated French collection in Slavic languages, as well as its translations and transformations, e.g. those that involve a change of one element: Liberty, equality, democracy; Liberty, equality, university, etc. In other cases, the whole construction functions as a component of a larger set of values. Attention is drawn to semantic relations between values within the construction, as well as to social functions and profiles of this constructions and its derivatives.
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The purpose of this article is to attempt to reconstruct the concept слобода (freedom) in the Serbian language. The analysis is based on survey data and their interpretation in relation to a broad context of culture, history and language. The starting point for the analysis are responses gathered in the Associative Dictionary of the Serbian Language. Associations are classified according to formal types, such as contrastive, metaphorical and metonymic associations. In terms of meaning, the responses were divided into the following conceptualizations: слобода personal freedom, слобода as struggle for independence, слобода as a bird, слобода as a boundless space, слобода as blue and white colors, слобода as a white horse, слобода as a place where we feel at ease, слобода as nature, слобода as a bridge, слобода as free will, слобода as the highest value. Presented associative fields have been documented with examples of idioms, proverbs, dictionary definitions, lyrics, and literary texts.
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The study concerns contemporary changes in the Polish conceptualization of the week. They result from the socio-cultural transformations in the country. Analyzed are lexicographic definitions of the names of tydzień (the week) and the results of the questionnaire administered in the years 2010--2012 to a hundred inhabitants of the Lublin region, aged 18--85. The question asked was: “Which day is the beginning of the week?”. Both the lexicographic data and the subjects’ responses point to two days: Sunday or Monday. These correspond to two attitudes: religious and secular, respectively, of which the latter currently predominates. The treatment of Sunday as the final, seventh day of the week results from the loosening of the ties between many people and the Catholic Church, as well as from a more liberal social lifestyle.
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In this article one semantic phenomenon is tentatively taken into consideration. This phenomenon emerged when historical discourse was under investigation but it is not limited only to historical texts. This phenomenon – which is in the absence of a better term called the semiotic projection of meaning – is crucial for language in general, for consciousness and cognitive mechanisms of human being. Every culture, confronting itself with such or such otherness – the otherness either of diverse cultures or past events, it has to overcome this otherness that is to say to adapt it which means that it has to impose on it a form that is more meaningful for itself. Putting it operationally, it has to inscribe the otherness in question into its own horizon of sense, and consequently – into its own semantic system. The understanding of past of understanding of an unknown culture can be seen as an adaptation of them. In this article such an adaptation is considered within three domains: history, other culture and universe of animals.
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Life and semantically related words (live, survive, live until, alive) in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago are used frequently and constitute a peculiar text of life. At the moment of crisis, the value of life rises. Life as a base value is realized through several basic oppositions: life vs. death, life in prison vs. life out of prison, life under arrest vs. life before and after arrest. The oppositions are, however, frequently reinterpreted in a specific manner: life in prison is identified with death, life is short but also long etc. The value of life, also in a prison camp, is for Solzhenitsyn comparable to other human values, such as honour, dignity, homeland, truth, conscience and especially freedom. In the era of Gulag the axiology of life depends on both objective and subjective causes. However, regardless of ambivalent and relativistic valuations, life is understood as the highest value and spiritual life is more important than life in the physical, corporeal sense.
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In a search of the method of reconstruction of the linguistic worldview of Europe, the author analyzes the usability of lexicographic definitions of the words Europa, Europejczyk ‘European-N’, europejski ‘European-ADJ’, europejskość ‘the quality of being European’ in dictionaries of Polish and in texts of contemporary Polish political discourse. He concludes that dictionary definitions are inadequate, tautological and metonymic, “perfectly uninformative”, because they do not answer the question of what content and values are associated with the words under consideration. An analysis of the verbal exponents of being European in centre and right-wing press has revealed, in turn, that the same words (Europa, Europejczyk, europejski, europejskość), used in radically opposing subdiscourses (pro- and anti-European), are also diametrically opposed to each other in these subdiscourses. The author postulates that “multiaspectual synthetic definitions” be used, linking elements of the classical, contextual and cognitive definition, thanks to which one may not only represent the fulness of the characteristics and values associated with these words, but also show that even contradictory characteristics and values belong to the same discourse.
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The meanings and functions of the “love of Europe” metaphor in Polish public discourse of the last two decades is the central subject of this essay. They are discerned by placing this metaphor in political and historical context. The author uses semiotic analysis especially the oppositions “male/female”, “rich/poor”, “developed/backward” and “central/peripheral” in order to expose the multiple levels of the “love of Europe” figure. The essay aims at demonstrating the selected cultural meanings of the notions “Europe” and “Europeanness” in Polish public discourse.
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The article aims to reconstruct the cultural content of the word gida in the African language of Hausa. The word, similarly to the Polish dom, means ‘dwelling place’ and, in the social context, ‘family, household’. An analysis of linguistic (grammatical, lexical, phraseological) data reveals changes in the conceptualization of home under the influence of the changing conditions of living and experience of the surrounding world.The adoption of Islam has not radically influenced the concept of home as a safe haven, reserved for the family. However, home began to be viewed as a stronghold separating the family from the rest of the world. The boundaries of home as one’s own, familiar and close place, associated with the closest relatives, may also be understood in Hausa in a wider sense: as one’s country, homeland and community unrelated by blood. This new understanding of home has emerged only in the current new historical conditions, especially in the media.
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Humboldt’s challenge to Cognitive Linguistics: A few brief reflections on the linguistic patterning of truth in Czech, French, English and GermanThe article is mainly concerned with methodological issues; the author concentrates on problems relating to the notion of worldview, especially when applied to linguistic research, pointing to the term’s vagueness, as it denotes both an individual conceptualization of the world and judgments entrenched in culture. He claims that in Great Britain and in America the familiarity with Wilhelm von Humboldt’s conception is insufficient. What frequently escapes the attention of researchers referring to Humboldt is the opposition Ergon – Energeia. Despite the fact that the terms are used in various publications, British and American linguistics does not capitalize on them and as a result studies language as an “object” rather than an exchange between communicating subjects. For Humboldt, language is not so much a “thing” as a faculty used by humans to understand the world. It is “objective” only in the sense of being super-individual: speakers share and negotiate meanings.The article also relates to the discussion on the so called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which has recently seen the emergence of two opposing camps: “the defenders of diversity” and “the defenders of the psychic unity of humankind”. A representative of the latter is Steven Pinker, whose ideas are criticized here as based on wrong assumptions of universal concepts (which in fact are typical of English) and omitting comparative research. The origin of this approach is sought in Noam Chomsky’s “transcendental scientific idealism”. On the other hand, empirical comparative research on universals conducted by Anna Wierzbicka is appreciated.The article also deals with the conception of linguistic determinism and its place in linguistics. The conception plays a limited role in Humboldt’s theory, who stresses the creativity of speakers and for whom language, thanks to the workings of the mind (Geist), can blaze new conceptual trails. The article also points to the insufficient reception of the thought of Edward Sapir: in today’s renaissance of linguistic anthropology, especially in the USA, Sapir’s views on creativity, subjectivity and individuality in shaping the language system by its users have largely been overlooked. If American and many other English-speaking linguists rarely relate to Sapir’s work in any detailed manner, it is very much alive in Polish ethnolinguistics (Bartmiński, Wierzbicka).The article also deals with contemporary cognitive linguistics, pointing out that the second generation of cognitive linguists often falls into the trap of “linguistics without language”, for the now predominant paradigm incites one to practice the bad method of studying relations between words and concepts in the English-based linguistic worldview and to accept a priori the universal nature of the conceptualizations within it. However, cognitive-inspired comparative research is noted as valuable, especially in the domain of metaphorization (in Prague or Lublin) – but such research is surprisingly infrequent in English-speaking countries.In the analytical part, the author comments on the concept of TRUTH in Czech, French, English and German, with special attention to the differences between them. He notes the distinction between the English truth and the Czech pravda, identifiable in semantic, morphological and phonetic links between this Czech word and other words, such as opravdový, spravedlivý, právo, i.e. lexemes relating to justice, the legal system and integrity. He also points to the differences between the English truth and the German Wahr, as well as different etymological relations of truth in comparison with the French vrai (from which vraisemblable is derived), translated into English as likely. Another problem is that of the semantics of grammatical gender: the author asks why French vérité, German Wahrheit and Czech pravda are feminine. In his divagations on the influence of gender on our intellectual life he refers to Voltaire and Simone de Beauvoir, as well as the literary output of Fénélon, with the light it casts on the femininity of vérité. He also invokes the poetry of František Halas, who uses the Latin word luna because its Czech counterpart, mesíc, is masculine – a manifestation of the Romantic feminization of nature. The creative dimension of communication, visible in literature, is not restricted, in the author’s opinion, to one style; on the contrary, communicating in language involves negotiations between tradition and innovation, between culture and individuality, and finally between the minds of interlocutors. How to account for these mechanisms is a challenge for linguists.
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The author tries to prove that the ancient mental structures which arose on the basis of myths and rituals, exist in modern mentality as superstitions, traditions, customs, or prohibitions. They are also entrenched in language.Analyzing a group of words with the meaning of ‘anger’ in Czech, Polish and Russian, the author notes that many of them (such as Czech zuřivost, Polish wściekłość, szał, Russian бешенство, безумие, ошалеть, буйный) have both positive and negative connotations. An etymological analysis of these words shows that many of them in old times denoted a “sacred madness”. This kind of behaviour (or anti-behaviour) characterized the so-called trickster, a figure which transformed into cheats and jesters in world literature.
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