Reflection of the language picture of the world. Language picture of the world

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The article is devoted to the study of the phenomenon of the language picture of the world. The notion of a linguistic picture of the world is considered as one of the ways of conceptualizing reality. An attempt is made to comprehend the originality of the language picture of the world as a way of representing reality in a certain verbal-associative range. The article systematizes the achievements of various areas of research into diverse worldviews, and provides a comprehensive description of the linguistic worldview. Also, universal signs inherent in any picture of the world are revealed. Particular attention is paid to the following phenomenological features of this concept: the status and variety of interpretations of the concept itself, the subject of study and structure, signs and functions of the LCM, the ratio of the individual and the collective, the universal and the nationally specific in it, its dynamic and static aspects, the peculiarities of variation and the typology of linguistic pictures of the world.

language model of the world

plurality of pictures of the world

worldview

Russian language

language picture of the world

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The linguistic picture of the world is one of the fundamental concepts of modern linguistics. For the first time, the idea of ​​a special linguistic worldview was expressed by W. von Humboldt, whose teaching arose in line with German classical philosophy at the beginning of the 19th century. And the appearance in linguistics of the concept language picture of the world (hereinafter - YKM) is associated with the practice of compiling ideographic dictionaries and with the problems of the structure and content of lexico-semantic fields, the relationship between them that arose in connection with the fact that a new, anthropocentric approach to language "required the development of new research methods and the expansion of the metalanguage of science » . According to Yu. L Vorotnikov: “The fact that a certain new archetype gradually (and to a certain extent unconsciously) enters the consciousness of linguists, predetermining the direction of the entire set of linguistic studies, seems quite obvious. It is possible, paraphrasing the title of one of Martin Heidegger's articles, to say that for the science of language the "time of the language picture of the world" has come. Humboldt applied the dialectical method to the analysis of language, according to which the world is viewed in development as a contradictory unity of opposites, as a whole, permeated with universal connections and mutual transitions of individual phenomena and their aspects, as a system. It was he who noted that each language in inseparable unity with consciousness creates a subjective image of the objective world. The ideas of V. von Humboldt were picked up by neo-Humboldtians, one of whose representatives, L. Weisgerber, in the thirties of the XX century introduced the term “linguistic picture of the world” (sprachliches Weltbild) into science, noting that spiritual content lives and influences in the language of a particular community, a treasure of knowledge, which is rightly called the picture of the world of a particular language. An important stage in the development of the theory of the language picture of the world is the work of the American ethnolinguists E. Sapir and B. Whorf. E. Sapir and his follower B. Whorf developed a hypothesis known as the "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis", which is the theoretical core of ethnolinguistics. According to this theory, the difference in the norms of thinking causes the difference in the norms of behavior in the cultural-historical interpretation. Comparing the Hopi language with the “Central European standard”, S. Whorf seeks to prove that even the basic categories of substance, space, time can be interpreted differently depending on the structure of the qualities of the language: “... the concepts of “time” and “matter” are not given from experience to all people in the same form. They depend on the nature of the language or languages ​​through the use of which they have developed. According to Whorf, we dissect nature in the direction suggested by our native language, and the world appears before us as a kaleidoscopic stream of impressions, which must be organized by our consciousness, and this means mainly by the language system stored in our consciousness. The world is dissected, organized into concepts, and we distribute meanings this way and not otherwise, mainly because we are parties to the agreement that prescribes such a systematization. This agreement is valid for a certain speech community and is fixed in the system of models of our language.

The special interest of linguists in LCM in the second half of the 20th - early 21st centuries, according to G.S. Samoilova, is caused by “a change in value orientations in education and science; humanization and humanitarization of science as a specific feature of scientific knowledge at the end of the 20th century;<...>strengthening the human factor in the language, addressing the problems of the formation and development of a linguistic personality; attention to the language as a social factor of national identification, as a means of national self-determination; expansion and strengthening of language contacts, leading to a comparison, the imposition of different language systems and the identification of the specifics of national languages ​​and national worldview ". During this period, JCM became the object of analysis by many domestic researchers (Yu. D. Apresyan, N. D. Arutyunova, Yu. N. Karaulov, E. V. Uryson, and others).

Initially emerging as a metaphor, JCM has given rise to many problems in linguistics related to its phenomenological features: it is the status and variety of interpretations of the concept itself, the subject of study and structure, signs and functions of JCM, the ratio of individual and collective, universal and nationally specific in it, its dynamic and static aspects, peculiarities of variation and typology of linguistic pictures of the world.

In linguistics, there are a large number of definitions of JKM, each of them focuses on certain aspects of the designated concept and therefore cannot be a generally accepted term.

The whole variety of interpretations of the concept of JKM can be reduced to two: wide and narrow.

1. So, some linguists (S. Yu. Anshakova, T. I. Vorontsova, L. A. Klimkova, O. A. Kornilov, Z. D. Popova, B. A. Serebrennikov, G. A. Shusharina and others .) understand by JKM "the subjective image of the objective world as a means of representing the conceptual picture of the world, which, however, does not fully cover it, as a result of the linguistic, speech-thinking activity of a multigenerational team over a number of epochs" . JKM are ideas about reality, “which seem to be taken for granted by native speakers of a given language. These ideas, which form a single system of views and prescriptions, are implicitly included in the meanings of linguistic units, so that a native speaker takes them on faith without hesitation and without noticing it.

Other scientists (N. A. Besedina, T. G. Bochina, M. V. Zavyalova, T. M. Nikolaeva, M. V. Pats, R. Kh. Khairullina, E. S. Yakovleva and others) believe that that LKM is “a scheme of perception of reality fixed in the language and specific for a given language community” .

In connection with the above contradiction, no less difficult is the lack of “clarity in understanding the boundaries of what is directly related to linguistic competence.<...>, and what goes beyond the limits of linguistic competence and belongs to consciousness in general or culture in general<...>and is not directly reflected in the language.

As A. A. Burov notes, LCM "includes a dictionary, a set of images fixed in linguistic signs, the speaker's ideostyle, the linguistic ideology of native speakers, the type of associative-verbal reflection of the world" . At the same time, the composition of the NCM components proposed by A.A. Burov can be supplemented. There is no doubt that, in addition to vocabulary - a dictionary, units of other levels of the language are involved in its formation, although most of the research on LCM is based on the material of vocabulary and phraseology.

So, LCM is the reality reflected in the language, the linguistic division of the world, information about the world, transmitted using language units of different levels.

The linguistic picture of the world is created in different ways; the most expressive and vivid, from our point of view, are phraseological units, mythologemes, figurative-metaphorical words, connotative words, etc. First of all, the attention of scientists was attracted by linguo-specific vocabulary and phraseology. Language-specific words are words for which it is difficult to find analogues in other languages.

The analysis of this material allowed Yu.D. Apresyan, E.E. Babaeva, O.Yu. Boguslavskaya, I.V. Galaktionova, L.T. Eloeva, T.V. Zhukova, Anna A. Zaliznyak, L.A. Klimkova, M.L. Kovshova, T.V. Krylov, I.B. Levontina, A.Yu. Malafeev, A.V. Ptentsova, G.V. Tokarev, E.V. Uryson, Yu.V. Khripunkova, A.T. Khrolenko, A.D. Shmelev and other scientists to reconstruct fragments of the YaKM, specific for the Russian vision of the world and Russian culture, to identify a number of cross-cutting motives, key ideas that are consistently repeated in the meaning of such Russian key words and phraseological units as log off(Yu.D. Apresyan, close,following, young,old, meat-empty,syropust, distance,expanse,freedom,expanse,space,restlessness,toil, languish, festivities, maybe, soul, fate, longing, happiness, separation, justice, resentment, reproach, to gather, get, try, happened, happened, at the same time, on foot, just in case, etc.. (Anna A. Zaliznyak, I.B. Levontina, A.D. Shmelev), Russian "duration indicators" moment, minute, instant, instant, second, hour(E.S. Yakovleva) and others.

Our understanding of the world is partially captured by the language picture of the world. Each specific language contains a national, original system that determines the worldview of the speakers of a given language and forms their picture of the world.

The world, reflected through the prism of the mechanism of secondary sensations, captured in metaphors, comparisons, symbols, is the main factor that determines the universality and specificity of any particular national language picture of the world. At the same time, an important circumstance is the distinction between the universal human factor and national specificity in various linguistic pictures of the world.

Thus, the linguistic picture of the world is a set of ideas about the world, historically formed in the ordinary consciousness of a given linguistic community and reflected in the language, a certain way of conceptualizing reality.

The problem of studying the linguistic picture of the world is closely related to the problem of the conceptual picture of the world, which reflects the specifics of a person and his being, his relationship with the world, the conditions of his existence.

For the reconstruction of LCM in linguistics, various linguistic means are used.

The comparative aspect of the language pictures of the world of different peoples from the point of view of vocabulary and phraseology is presented in the works of G. A. Bagautdinova, who studied anthropocentric phraseological units in the Russian and English JKM, H. A. Jahangiri Azar, who compared the YKM of the Russian and Persian languages, M.V. Zavyalova, who revealed the features of the world models of the Russian and Lithuanian peoples on the material of conspiracies, Li Toan Thang, who analyzed the spatial model of the world on the material of the Vietnamese and Russian languages, Yu. phraseological picture of the world of the Russian and Bashkir languages, T. A. Yakovleva, who analyzed substantive polysemy as a source of study of YKM on the material of German and Spanish.

The role of the tropics in the formation of the JCM was also studied (A.V. Blagovidova, E.V. Vasilyeva, V.A. Plungyan, I.V. Sorokina, V.N. Teliya, E.A. Yurina, etc.).

The linguistic picture of the world can be reconstructed using the data of the word-formation system. So, E.S. Kubryakova studied the role of word formation in the formation of JKM. CM. Kolesnikova revealed the features of the content of the gradual fragment of the Russian YaKM. General problems of gradual semantics are analyzed by S.M. Kolesnikova, taking into account word-building means of expressing varying degrees of magnitude of a sign, action, object or phenomenon.

Grammatical means, according to linguists, are also extremely important in the formation of ICM. The attention of linguists was attracted by the connections of the semantics of different parts of speech with the LCM (I.Yu. Grineva, I.M. Kobozeva, A.G., L.B. Lebedeva), the role of individual grammatical and lexico-grammatical categories in the linguistic way of reflecting reality (O F. Zholobov, O.S. Ilchenko, N.Yu. Lukina, reflection of the Russian language picture of the world in vocabulary and grammar, reflection of YKM in the syntactic constructions of different languages ​​(E.V. Agafonova, L.G. Babenko, A.A. . Burov and others).

JKM from the point of view of text organization was considered by I.R. Galperin, E.I. Dibrova, I.P. Karlyavina, S.D. Katsnelson, L.M. Loseva, E.I. Matveeva, T.M. Nikolaev and others.

Finally, when reconstructing LCM, a number of scientists, in addition to the facts of language, take into account any texts of culture, considering concepts and general semantic categories of language to be the main components of LCM. So, A.P. Babushkin K. Duysekova singled out the types of concepts in the lexical and phraseological system of the language, Z.D. Popova - in the syntax.

JCM has a complex typology. With regard to linguistics, the picture of the world should represent a systematized plan of the language. As you know, any language performs a number of functions: the function of communication (communicative), the function of communication (informative), the function of influence (emotive) and the function of fixing and storing the entire complex of knowledge and ideas of a given language community about the world. The result of understanding the world by each of the types of consciousness is fixed in the matrices of the language that serves this type of consciousness. In addition, the picture of the world contains an ethnic component, which is represented by a linguistic picture of the world, as well as a set of traditions, beliefs, and superstitions. Thus, one should talk about the plurality of pictures of the world: about the scientific linguistic picture of the world, the linguistic picture of the world of the national language, the linguistic picture of the world of an individual, the phraseological picture of the world, the ethnic picture of the world, etc.

According to L. A. Klimkova, “YKM, being an invariant, is a system of fragments (private YKM) - ethnic, territorial (regional), social, individual, reflecting the perception and understanding of the surrounding world by a person as a representative of an ethnic group, a certain territory (region) , society, as a person".

In turn, the ethnic YKM also includes private fragments. These can be regional YCLs within the national YCL and dialectal JCLs with regional JCLs within it. From the standpoint of sociolinguistics, the Soviet ideological YKM (T.V. Shkaiderova), elitist and mass YKM (S.M. Belyakova) are studied. From the point of view of the level approach to language learning, the phraseological JKM of T.M. Filonenko, R.Kh. Khairullin.

In addition to scientific and naive pictures of the world, a national linguistic picture of the world stands out. As you know, the role of language is not only in the transmission of a message, but also in the internal organization of what is to be communicated, as a result of which a “space of meanings” appears (in the terminology of A.N. Leontiev), i.e. the knowledge about the world fixed in the language, where the national and cultural experience of a particular linguistic community is certainly intertwined. It is in the content side of the language (to a lesser extent in grammar) that the picture of the world of a given ethnic group is revealed, which becomes the foundation of all cultural stereotypes.

There are as many national language pictures of the world as there are languages. Some scholars argue that the national picture of the world is impenetrable to foreign-language consciousness, it is assumed that the use of such words as cognizability and comprehensibility is the most successful, since it is possible to know the national linguistic picture of the world of a native speaker of another language only by consciously removing one’s own picture of the world from the equivalents, using the principle “ presumption of ignorance” (G. D. Gachev). We believe that the national picture of the world can be considered a reflection of the national character and mentality.

Reviewers:

Peshkova N. P., Doctor of Philological Sciences, Professor, Head of the Department of Foreign Languages ​​of the Faculty of Natural Sciences, Bashkir State University, Ufa.

Ibragimova V.L., Doctor of Philological Sciences, Professor of the Department of General and Comparative-Historical Linguistics, Bashkir State University, Ufa.

Bibliographic link

Gabbasova A.R., Fatkullina F.G. LANGUAGE PICTURE OF THE WORLD: MAIN FEATURES, TYPOLOGY AND FUNCTIONS // Modern problems of science and education. - 2013. - No. 4.;
URL: http://science-education.ru/ru/article/view?id=9954 (date of access: 09/17/2019). We bring to your attention the journals published by the publishing house "Academy of Natural History"

In modern scientific literature, in addition to the term linguistic picture of the world, one can also find the phrases picture of the world, scientific and naive picture of the world. Let's try to briefly define what is behind them and what are the specifics of each of these concepts.
The picture of the world is a certain system of ideas about the reality around us. This concept was first used by the famous Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) in his famous Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (the work was written in 1916-1918 and published in Germany in 1921). According to L. Wittgenstein, the world around us is a collection of facts, not things, and it is determined solely by facts. The human mind creates for itself images of facts that represent a certain model of reality. This model, or picture of facts, reproduces the structure of reality as a whole or the structure of its individual components (in particular, spatial, color, etc.).
In the modern sense, the picture of the world is a kind of portrait of the universe, it is a kind of copy of the Universe, which involves a description of how the world works, what laws it is governed by, what underlies it and how it develops, what space and time look like, how they interact various objects, what place a person occupies in this world, etc. The most complete picture of the world is given by its scientific picture, which is based on the most important scientific achievements and streamlines our knowledge about the various properties and patterns of being. It can be said that this is a kind of systematization of knowledge, it is a holistic and at the same time complex structure, which can include both the general scientific picture of the world and the pictures of the world of individual private sciences, which in turn can be based on a number of different concepts, moreover, concepts constantly renewing and changing. The scientific picture of the world differs significantly from the religious concepts of the universe: the scientific picture is based on an experiment, thanks to which it is possible to confirm or refute the reliability of certain judgments; and the religious picture is based on faith (in sacred texts, in the words of the prophets, etc.).
A naive picture of the world reflects the material and spiritual experience of a people speaking a particular language; it can be quite different from a scientific picture, which in no way depends on the language and can be common to different peoples. A naive picture is formed under the influence of the cultural values ​​and traditions of a particular nation that are relevant in a certain historical era and is reflected, first of all, in the language - in its words and forms. Using in speech words that carry certain meanings in their meanings, a native speaker of a certain language, without realizing it, accepts and shares a certain view of the world.
So, for example, for a Russian person it is obvious that his intellectual life is connected with the head, and emotional - with the heart: remembering something, we store it in the head; the head cannot be kind, golden or stone, and the heart cannot be smart or bright (in Russian, the opposite is true); the head does not hurt for someone and we do not feel it - only the heart is capable of this (it hurts, aches, smells, aches, hope can arise in it, etc.). “The head allows a person to reason sensibly; about a person endowed with such an ability, they say a clear (bright) head, and about someone who is deprived of such an ability, they say that he is without a king in his head, that he has wind in his head, porridge in his head, or that he is completely without a head on his shoulders. True, even a person with a head can go round in circles (for example, if someone turns his head); he can even completely lose his head, especially often this happens with lovers, in whom the heart, and not the head, becomes the main governing body.<…>The head is also an organ of memory (cf. such expressions as keep in the head, flew out of the head, thrown out of the head, etc.). In this respect, the Russian language model of a person differs from the archaic Western European model, in which the memory organ was rather the heart (traces of this are preserved in such expressions as the English learn by heart or the French savoir par coeur), and approaches the German model (cf. aus dem Kopf). True, memory of the heart is also possible in Russian, but this is said only about emotional, not intellectual memory. If to throw out (throw) out of the head means to 'forget' or 'to stop thinking' about someone or something, then to tear out of the heart (of someone) does not mean 'forget', but means 'to fall out of love' (or 'to make trying to fall out of love'), cf. proverb Out of sight, out of mind. .
However, such a naive picture of the world, where the inner life of a person is localized in the head (mind, intellect) and in the heart (feelings and emotions), is not at all universal. So, in the language of the natives of Ifaluk Island (one of the thirty atolls of the Caroline Archipelago, located in the western part of the Pacific Ocean, in Micronesia), the rational and emotional are in principle not separated and “placed” in the inside of a person. Moreover, the Ifaluk people do not even have a special word for emotions or feelings: the word niferash in their language, which refers to the internal organs of a person as an anatomical concept, is at the same time the “receptacle” of all Ifaluk people’s thoughts, feelings, emotions, desires and needs. In the Dogon African language (West Africa, the Republic of Mali), the role that our heart plays is assigned to another internal organ - the liver, which, of course, is in no way connected with any specific anatomical structure of the speakers of these languages. So, to get angry in the Dogon language literally means to feel the liver, to please means to take the liver, to calm down - to lower the liver, to enjoy - to sweeten the liver, etc.
So, any specific human language reflects a certain way of perceiving and understanding the world, and all speakers of a given language share (often without realizing it) this peculiar system of views on the surrounding non-linguistic reality, since this special worldview is contained not only in the semantics of lexical units , but also in the design of morphological and syntactic structures, in the presence of certain grammatical categories and meanings, in the features of word-formation models of the language, etc. (all this is included in the concept of the language picture of the world). Let's demonstrate this with one more, fairly simple example.
Every day we greet each other, using greeting formulas that have been established for centuries and without thinking about their content. How do we do it? It turns out it's very different. So, many representatives of the Slavic languages, including Russian, actually wish the interlocutor health (hello in Russian, hello or healthy (healthy) buli in Ukrainian, zdraveite in Bulgarian, zdravo in Macedonian, etc.). English speakers greeting each other with How do you do? are actually asking How are you doing?; the French, saying Comment ça va?, are interested in how it goes; German greeting Wie geht es? means How are you?; Italians, greeting with the phrase Come sta ?, find out how you stand. The Jewish greeting Shalom is a literal wish for peace. In fact, representatives of many Muslim nations also wish peace to everyone, saying to each other Salaam alei-kun! (Arabic) or Salaam aleihum (Azerb.), etc. The ancient Greeks, greeting each other, wished for joy: this is how the ancient Greek haire is literally translated. Apparently, in the Slavic picture of the world, health was seen as something extremely important, in the picture of the world of Jews and Arabs (which is not surprising, if we recall their history and look at the modern life of these peoples), the most important thing is the world, in the minds of the British one of the central places are occupied by work, labor, etc.
The very concept of a linguistic picture of the world (but not the term that names it) goes back to the ideas of Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835), an outstanding German philologist, philosopher and statesman. Considering the relationship between language and thinking, Humboldt came to the conclusion that thinking does not just depend on language in general, but to a certain extent it depends on each specific language. He, of course, was well aware of the attempts to create universal sign systems, similar to those that, for example, mathematics has. Humboldt does not deny that a certain number of words of different languages ​​can be "reduced to a common denominator", but in the overwhelming majority of cases this is impossible: the individuality of different languages ​​is manifested in everything - from the alphabet to ideas about the world; a huge number of concepts and grammatical features of one language often cannot be preserved when translated into another language without their transformation.
Cognition and language mutually determine each other, and moreover: according to Humboldt, languages ​​are not just a means of depicting already known truth, but a tool for discovering the still unknown, and in general, language is “an organ that forms thought”, it is not just a means of communication, but it is also an expression of the spirit and outlook of the speaker. Through the diversity of languages, the richness of the world and the diversity of what we learn in it are revealed to us, since different languages ​​give us different ways of thinking and perceiving the reality around us. The famous metaphor proposed by Humboldt in this connection is that of circles: in his opinion, each language describes around the nation it serves a circle, beyond which a person can only go so far as he immediately enters the circle of another language. The study of a foreign language is therefore the acquisition of a new point of view in the worldview that has already developed in a given individual.
And all this is possible because human language is a special world that is located between the external world that exists independently of us and the inner world that is enclosed within us. This thesis of Humboldt, voiced in 1806, in a little over a hundred years will turn into the most important neo-Humboldtian postulate of language as an intermediate world (Zwischenwelt).
The development of a number of Humboldt's ideas regarding the concept of a linguistic picture of the world was presented within the framework of American ethnolinguistics, primarily in the works of E. Sapir and his student B. Whorf, now known as the hypothesis of linguistic relativity. Edward Sapir (1884-1939) understood language as a system of heterogeneous units, all components of which are connected by rather peculiar relationships. These relationships are unique, just as each specific language is unique, where everything is arranged in accordance with its own laws. It was the absence of the possibility of establishing element-by-element correspondences between the systems of different languages ​​that Sapir understood as linguistic relativity. He also used the term “incommensurability” of languages ​​to express this idea: different language systems not only fix the content of the cultural and historical experience of a native speaker in different ways, but also provide all speakers of a given language with unique, not coinciding with others, ways of mastering non-linguistic reality. and ways of perceiving it.
According to Sapir, language and thought are inextricably linked; in a sense, they are one and the same. And although the internal content of all languages, in his opinion, is the same, their external form is endlessly diverse, since this form embodies the collective art of thinking. A scientist defines culture as what a given society does and thinks. Language is how people think. Each language carries a certain intuitive registration of experience, and the special structure of each language is the specific "how" of our registration of experience.
The role of language as a guiding principle in the scientific study of culture is extremely important, since the system of cultural stereotypes of any civilization is ordered with the help of the language that serves this civilization. Moreover, language is understood by Sapir as a kind of guide in social reality, since it significantly affects our understanding of social processes and problems. “People live not only in the material world and not only in the social world, as is commonly believed: to a large extent, they are all in the power of that particular language that has become a means of expression in a given society. The notion that a person navigates the outside world essentially without the aid of language, and that language is just an accidental means of solving specific problems of thinking and communication, is just an illusion. In reality, the "real world" is largely unconsciously built on the basis of the language habits of a particular social group. Two different languages ​​are never so similar that they can be considered a means of expressing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are different worlds, and not the same world with different labels attached to it.<…>We see, hear and generally perceive the world around us in this way and not otherwise, mainly due to the fact that our choice in interpreting it is predetermined by the linguistic habits of our society.
The term principle of linguistic relativity (by analogy with A. Einstein's principle of relativity) was introduced by Benjamin Whorf (1897-1941): “We dismember the world, organize it into concepts and distribute values ​​in this way, and not otherwise, mainly because we are parties to the agreement prescribing such a systematization. This agreement is valid for a certain speech community and is fixed in the system of models of our language.<…>We are thus confronted with a new principle of relativity, which says that similar physical phenomena make it possible to create a similar picture of the universe only if the language systems are similar, or at least correlative.
Whorf is the founder of research on the place and role of linguistic metaphors in the conceptualization of reality. It was he who first drew attention to the fact that the figurative meaning of a word can not only influence how its original meaning functions in speech, but it even determines the behavior of native speakers in some situations. In modern linguistics, the study of the metaphorical meanings of words has turned out to be a very relevant and productive activity. First of all, it is worth mentioning the studies conducted by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, starting from the 1980s, which convincingly showed that linguistic metaphors play an important role not only in poetic language, but also structure our everyday perception of the world and thinking. The so-called cognitive theory of metaphor arose, which became widely known and popular outside of linguistics proper. In the famous book “Metaphors we live by”, the point of view was substantiated, according to which the metaphor is the most important mechanism for mastering the world by human thinking and plays a significant role in shaping the human conceptual system and the structure of natural language.
Actually, the term language picture of the world (Weltbild der Sprache) was introduced into scientific use by the German linguist Johann Leo Weisgerber (1899-1985) in the 30s. XX century. In the article “The Connection between the Native Language, Thinking and Action”, L. Weisgerber wrote that “the vocabulary of a particular language includes, in general, along with the totality of linguistic signs, also the totality of conceptual mental means that the language community has; and as each native speaker learns this vocabulary, all members of the language community master these mental means; In this sense, it can be said that the possibility of a native language lies in the fact that it contains a certain picture of the world in its concepts and forms of thinking and transmits it to all members of the linguistic community. In later works, the picture of the world is entered by Weisgerber not only into the vocabulary, but into the content side of the language as a whole, including not only lexical semantics, but also the semantics of grammatical forms and categories, morphological and syntactic structures.
Weisgerber allowed the relative freedom of human consciousness from the linguistic picture of the world, but within its own framework, i.e. the originality of this or that person will be limited by the national specifics of the language picture of the world: for example, a German will not be able to see the world the way a Russian or an Indian sees it from his “window”. Weisgerber says that we are dealing with the invasion of our native language into our views: even where our personal experience could show us something different, we remain true to the worldview that is transmitted to us by our native language. At the same time, according to Weisgerber, language affects not only how we understand objects, but also determines which objects we subject to certain conceptual processing.
In the mid 30s. Weisgerber recognizes field research as the most important method for studying the picture of the world, while he relies on the principle of mutual limitation of field elements, formulated by J. Trier. A verbal field (Wortfeld) is a group of words used to describe a certain sphere of life or a certain semantic, conceptual, sphere. It, according to Weisgerber, exists as a whole, therefore the meanings of the individual words included in it are determined by the structure of the field and the place of each of its components in this structure. The structure of the field itself is determined by the semantic structure of a particular language, which has its own view of the objectively existing non-linguistic reality. When describing the semantic fields of a particular language, it is extremely important to pay attention to which fields look the richest and most diverse in this language: after all, the semantic field is a fragment from the intermediate world of the native language. Weisgerber creates a classification of fields, delimiting them both in terms of the sphere of reality they describe, and taking into account the degree of language activity in their formation.
As an example of a specific semantic field of the German language, consider the field of verbs with the meaning "to die". This example is quite often given in a number of works of the scientist himself. This field (as Weisgerber represents it) consists of four circles: inside the first of them is placed the general content of all these verbs - the cessation of life (Aufhören des Lebens); the second circle contains three verbs expressing this content in relation to people (sterben), animals (verenden) and plants (eingehen); the third circle expands and refines each of these particular areas in terms of the way life ends (for plants - fallen, erfrieren, for animals - verhungern, unkommen, for people - zugrunde gehen, erliegen, etc.); finally, the fourth circle contains stylistic variants of the main content of the field: ableben, einschlummern, entschlafen, hinűbergehen, heimgehen (for high style) and verrecken, abkratzen, verröcheln, erlöschen, verscheiden (for low or fairly neutral word usage).
Thus, the linguistic picture of the world is reflected primarily in the dictionary. The main subject basis for it is created by nature (soil, climate, geographical conditions, flora and fauna, etc.), certain historical events. Thus, for example, the Swiss-German dialect exhibits an astonishing variety of words for specific aspects of the mountains, and these words mostly have no corresponding counterparts in standard German. At the same time, we are talking not just about synonymous wealth, but about a completely specific and very peculiar understanding of some aspects of the mountain landscape.
In a number of cases, such a specific vision and representation of natural phenomena, flora and fauna, which this or that language gives us in the semantics of individual words, does not coincide with scientific classifications or even contradicts them. In particular, both Russian and German have such words (and, accordingly, the concepts they designate) as weed (German Unkraut), berry (German Beere), fruit (German Obst), vegetables (German Gemüse) and others. Moreover, many of this kind of words, quite definitely represented in our minds and often used in everyday life, are even “older” than the corresponding botanical terms. In fact, such phenomena simply do not exist in nature, some of them could not even be “conceived” by nature: based on the criteria established and proposed in botany, it is impossible to single out a certain subset of plants called weeds or weeds. This concept is obviously the result of human judgment: we classify a number of plants into this category on the basis of their unsuitability, uselessness and even harmfulness to us. The concepts of fruits and vegetables are rather culinary or food, rather than scientific, they do not correspond in any way with the structural morphological classification of the plant world. The concept of a berry, on the contrary, is presented in botany, but its scope (as a scientific concept) does not coincide with our everyday understanding of this object: far from all the fruits that we call berries are, strictly speaking, such (for example, cherries, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries are not berries from a scientific point of view, but drupes) - this is on the one hand; on the other hand, there are “real” berries that we are not used to designating with this word (for example, watermelon, tomato or cucumber).
Many natural phenomena are not only seen by languages ​​“incorrectly” (i.e., in the corresponding branch of scientific knowledge, such phenomena either do not exist, or they are understood differently), but also different languages ​​see it differently: in particular, , the German language does not see the differences between strawberries and strawberries, cherries and cherries, clouds and clouds, like Russian - i.e. in German, for these cases, "provided" for one word, and not for a couple, as we do.
Naturally, such naive ideas about nature, fixed in the lexical units of the language, do not remain unchanged and stable, but change over time. Thus, according to L. Weisgerber, many words related to the animal kingdom had different meanings in Middle High German than those they have in modern German. Previously, the word tier was not a general designation for the entire animal world, as it is now, but meant only four-legged wild animals; Middle High German wurm, unlike the modern Wurm 'worm', also included snakes, dragons, spiders and caterpillars; Middle High German vogel, in addition to birds, also called bees, butterflies, and even flies. In general, the Middle High German classification of the animal world looked something like this: on the one hand, domestic animals stood out - vihe, on the other - wild, subdivided into 4 classes depending on their mode of movement (tier 'running animal', vogel 'flying animal', wurm 'creeping animal', visch 'swimming animal'). This, in its own way, quite logical and harmonious picture does not at all coincide either with zoological classifications or with what we have in modern German.
In the history of Russian linguo-philosophical thought, the ideas about language as a tool for thinking and understanding the world, first formulated by W. Humboldt, became popular after the publication of the book "Thought and Language" by Alexander Afanasyevich Potebnya (1835-1891). Potebnya presents the correlation of language and thinking in this way: thought exists independently of language, since along with verbal thinking there is also non-verbal thinking. So, in his opinion, a child does not speak until a certain age, but in a certain sense he thinks, i.e. perceives sensual images, recalls them and even partially generalizes; the creative thought of a painter, sculptor, or musician is accomplished without words—i.e. the realm of language does not always coincide with the realm of thought. On the whole, however, language is undoubtedly a means of objectifying thought.
Potebnya also, following Humboldt, operates with the concept of the spirit, but he understands the spirit in a slightly different way - as a conscious mental activity that involves concepts that are formed only through the word. And, of course, the language is not identical with the spirit of the people.
Language seems to be the means, or instrument, of every other human activity. At the same time, language is something more than an external tool, and its meaning for cognition is rather similar to the meaning of such organs of sensory perception as the eye or ear. In the process of observing the native and foreign languages ​​and summarizing the data obtained, Potebnya comes to the conclusion that the path along which a person’s thought is directed is determined by his native language. And different languages ​​are also profoundly different systems of ways of thinking. Therefore, a universal or universal language would be only a lowering of the level of thought. Potebnya refers only to their articulateness (from the point of view of their external side, i.e. sounds) and the fact that they are all systems of symbols that serve thought (from the point of view of their inner side) to the universal properties of languages. All the rest of their properties are individual, not universal. So, for example, there is not a single grammatical or lexical category that would be mandatory for all languages ​​of the world. According to Potebnya, language is also a form of thought, but one that is not found in anything other than language itself, and, like W. Humboldt, A.A. Potebnya argues that “language is a means not to express a ready-made thought, but to create it, that it is not a reflection of the prevailing worldview, but the activity that composes it.
The word gives not only the consciousness of a thought, but also something else - that a thought, like the sounds accompanying it, exists not only in the speaker, but also in the one who understands. The word appears in this connection as "a certain form of thought, like a glazed frame that defines the circle of observations and colors the observed in a certain way." On the whole, the word is the most obvious pointer for consciousness to the completed act of cognition. It is characteristic that, according to Potebnya, "the word does not express the entire content of the concept, but only one of the signs, precisely the one that seems to be the most important to the popular view."
The word can have an internal form, which is defined as the ratio of the content of thought to consciousness. It shows how a person sees his own thought. Only this can explain why in the same language there can be several words for the same object and, conversely, one word can designate heterogeneous objects. In accordance with this, the word has two contents: objective and subjective. The first is understood as the closest etymological meaning of the given word, which includes only one sign, for example, the content of the word table as laid out, bedded. The second is capable of including many features - for example, the image of the table in general. At the same time, the internal form is not just one of the signs of the image associated with the word, but the center of the image, one of its signs, prevailing over all the others, which is especially obvious in words with a transparent etymology. The internal form of the word uttered by the speaker, according to Potebnya, gives the direction of the listener's thoughts, without assigning limits to his understanding of the word.
There are words in the language with a “live representation” (i.e., with an internal form understandable to modern native speakers, for example: window sill, bruise, dungeon, blueberry) and words with a “forgotten representation” (i.e., with a lost, lost for a given moment internal form: ring, shoot, hoop, image). This is inherent in the very essence of the word, in what this word lives: sooner or later, the idea that serves as the center of meaning is forgotten or becomes unimportant, insignificant for the speakers of this language. So, we no longer correlate with each other such words as bag and fur, window and eye, fat and live, bear and honey, offend and see, although historically and etymologically they were closely related.
At the same time, both Potebnya and Weisgerber note independently of each other, in some cases phenomena of a different kind are observed: people often begin to believe that it is possible to extract the relationship of things from the similarity of the sound forms of the names that call them. This gives rise to a special type of human behavior - due to folk etymology, which is also a phenomenon of the impact of a particular language on its speakers. Linguistic mysticism, linguistic magic arises, people begin to look at the word “as truth and essence” (Potebnya), a fairly common (perhaps even universal) phenomenon is formed - “linguistic realism” (Weisgerber). Linguistic realism implies boundless trust in the language on the part of its speakers, a naive confidence that the similarity of the external and internal forms of words entails the similarity of things and phenomena called by these words. The picture of the world of the native language is perceived by its speakers as a natural reality and becomes the basis of mental activity.
How exactly can the so-called linguistic realism manifest itself? The simplest and most common phenomenon in this regard is folk etymology, which, unlike scientific etymology, is based not on the laws of language development, but on the random similarity of words. At the same time, alteration and rethinking of a borrowed (less often - native) word can be observed along the lines of a word close to it in sounding in the native language, but which differs from it in origin. So, for example, the words muhlyazh instead of dummy, gulvar instead of boulevard, etc. arose among the people. Modifying words in this way, completely or partially rethinking them due to arbitrary convergence with similar-sounding words, speakers strive to make a word that is unmotivated for them motivated and understandable. Sometimes such an erroneous etymology of a word can be fixed and preserved in the language, and not only in its colloquial or vernacular version, but also in the literary one. Such, for example, is the historically incorrect modern understanding of the word witness in the sense of "eyewitness", connecting it with the verb to see, instead of the correct original meaning "informed person", because earlier this word looked like a witness and was associated with the verb to know, i.e. know.
This kind of "etymology" is often found in children's speech. A huge number of funny examples are given, in particular, in the famous book by K.I. Chukovsky “From two to five”. A child, mastering and comprehending "adult" words, often wants the sound to have a meaning, so that the word has an image that is understandable to him and at the same time quite specific and even tangible, and if this image is not there, the child "corrects" this mistake by creating his own image. new word. So, the three-year-old Mura, Chukovsky's daughter, asked for mazeline for her mother: this is how she “revived” the word vaseline, which was dead for her (this is an ointment that is smeared with something). Another child called lipstick lipstick for the same reason. Two-year-old Kirill, being sick, asked that they put a cold mocress on his head, i.e. compress. Little Busya (which is typical, like some other children) aptly called the dentist's drill a pain machine. As K.I. Chukovsky rightly notes, if a child does not notice a direct correspondence between the function of an object and its name, he corrects the name, emphasizing in this word the function of the object that he managed to discern. This is how a children's hammer appeared instead of a hammer (because they are beaten), a ventilator instead of a fan (it spins), a digger instead of a shovel (they dig with it), a sander instead of an excavator (because it rakes sand), etc.
Another manifestation of linguistic realism is cases of a certain and very peculiar type of behavior of native speakers, due to folk etymology, these are even special customs and folk signs, which at first glance seem inexplicable and strange, but are also associated with folk etymological interpretations of names. Under the influence of the external or internal form of words, myths are created among the people that determine the behavior of ordinary people.
Let's show this with specific examples. In Russia, on April 12 (according to the new style - 25) of April, the day of Basil of Pariah is celebrated. The Monk Basil, Bishop of the Diocese of Pariah in Asia Minor, lived in the 8th century. When the iconoclastic heresy arose, he advocated the veneration of holy icons, for which he suffered persecution, hunger, and poverty. Now let's see what signs are associated among the people with the day when they remember Basil of Pariah:
On St. Basil's Day, spring soars the earth.
On Vasily, the earth is steamed like an old woman in a bath.
If the sun really soars the earth, then the year will be fertile.
Obviously, all these statements are due to the consonance of the words Parian and soar, behind which in reality there is nothing but the similarity of appearance.
May 23 is the day of the Apostle Simon the Zealot. Simon received the name Zealot, i.e. zealot, adherent, because preached the teachings of Christ in a number of countries and was martyred. The Greek name Zealot was incomprehensible to ordinary Russian speakers, but the people believed that there was some connection between the words Zealot and gold. Therefore, they look for treasures against the Apostle Simon the Zealot in the belief that he helps treasure hunters. There is another custom associated with this day: on May 23, the peasants walk through the forests and glades, collecting various herbs, which are credited with a special healing power, because. in Ukrainian, the name of the apostle resembles the word zilla, i.e. medicinal herbs.
Such examples of linguistic realism (but already concerning German speakers) can also be found in the works of Weisgerber. Saint Augustine, Bishop of Hippo in North Africa, is one of the most famous people in the Catholic Church. At the same time, the people considered him a protector from eye diseases, because. the beginning of his name is consonant with the German Auge ‘eye’. And the holy martyr Valentine is considered by Catholics to be the patron of not only lovers, but also epileptics. In the past, epilepsy was even called St. Valentine's disease. The fact is that the Latin name Valentinus turned out to be consonant with the Old High German verb fallan ‘to fall’ (cf. with the modern English verb to fall or the German fallend hin ‘falling to the ground’; the old Russian name for epilepsy epilepsy is also derived from the verb to fall). Because of this consonance, first among the Germanic-speaking peoples, and then among their neighbors, Valentine began to be revered as a healer of epilepsy.
These phenomena can be called etymological magic, which consists in the fact that consonant words converge in the minds of speakers of a particular language, and the resulting connection is reflected in folklore and rituals associated with the objects that these words denote.
Since we are talking about the people's worldview and worldview, reflected and contained in a particular language, it is necessary to dwell separately on the question of how the picture of the world that has developed in any literary language correlates with different modifications of this picture presented in different language dialects. . Moreover, many linguists who dealt with this problem attached special importance to dialect data. So, in particular, L. Weisgerber called the dialect "language development of native places" and believed that it was the dialect that participates in the process of spiritual creation of the homeland. It is dialects and dialects that often retain what the normalized literary language loses - both individual linguistic units, special grammatical forms or unexpected syntactic structures, as well as a special worldview, fixed, for example, in the semantics of words and in general in the presence of individual words that are absent in the literary language. language.
We will show this with specific examples, selected by us mainly from the “Dictionary of Russian Folk Dialects” with the involvement of the “Dictionary of Meteorological Vocabulary of the Oryol Dialects”, as well as the “Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language” by V.I. Dal.
Let us first take the word rain and look at the corresponding dictionary entry in V.I.Dal's dictionary. After defining this concept (according to Dahl, rain is water in drops or jets from clouds), we will find a number of synonyms for the noun rain that existed in the middle of the 19th century in Russian. So, in addition to the neutral rain, in the Russian language there were nouns rain (which is still available in the literary language to denote the heaviest rain), slanting, podstega (oblique rain in the direction of a strong wind), senochnoy (rain during haymaking), leplen (rain with snow), sitnik, sitnichek (the smallest rain), drizzle, bus (the tiniest rain, like wet dust), as well as rubbish, hut, chicher, bushikha, busenets, sitovnik, sityaga, morokh, morok, lying, sitiven, situkha. Unfortunately, the dictionary of V.I.Dal does not always indicate in which dialect or dialect a particular word occurs, and not all words have their meanings. Therefore, in our case, it is rather difficult to assess where (in a general literary language or in a dialect; if in a dialect, then specifically in which one) and how rain was presented as a natural phenomenon: what special shades of meanings (compared to the neutral noun rain) were carried by other naming this concept, how many there were, etc.
Let us now look at the synonyms of rain we have selected according to the data of the modern dictionaries of Russian dialects mentioned above. Below are two different pictures that are found in the Oryol and Arkhangelsk dialects. In fact, these are two peculiar classifications of rain, given in the meanings of individual words.
In Oryol's interpretation, rain is like this:
heavy rain - waterfall, dozhzhevina;
fine drizzling rain - rush;
light rain with a strong headwind - chaff;
lingering rain - encrusted;
intermittent rain - scarecrow;
sloping rain - slanting;
rain with thunder - thunder;
mushroom rain - poultice;
rain at the end of June - borage;
rain during haymaking - haymaking.
Arkhangelsk dialects represent the same atmospheric phenomenon in a slightly different way:
heavy rain - flood;
light drizzling rain - busik;
lingering rain - rain, cover, okladnik;
warm rain - parun;
warm mushroom rain - obobochnik;
fine continuous rain during haymaking - pus.
As you can see, the ideas about different types of rain do not coincide here, and the names for the matching types of rain are different in each case. There is nothing of the kind in the picture that the modern literary Russian language shows us. Of course, you can indicate one or another type of rain by adding the appropriate adjectives (large, small, oblique, torrential, tropical, frequent, mushroom, etc.), verbs (it can rain, drizzle, drizzle, pour, sow, to allow, etc.) or even using established phraseological combinations (it pours like a bucket; it pours as if the sky had broken through, etc.). But at the same time, it is important that in the literary language there are no separate nouns that name those concepts that are presented in dialects or dialects.
This statement is also true for a huge number of other concepts and words that name them. So, the wind in Oryol dialects happens:
very strong - sail, wind blower;
strong with rain and hail - a boulder;
oncoming - enemy;
passing - wind;
warm summer - letnik;
cold autumn - autumn;
north - north;
eastern - Astrakhan.
Arkhangelsk dialects give a slightly more diverse picture for describing the types of wind:
very strong - windy;
strong autumn - listoder;
oncoming - adversary;
cold - fresh;
wind from the sea - a sailor;
wind from the shore - coast;
northern - zasiverka, siverko;
northeast - night owl, freezer;
south - dinner;
western - westerner.
As you can see, these wind classifications, given in the meanings of the words of the above dialects, are not always consistent and logical (for example, why in the first case there are names for the north and east winds, but not for the west and south), they were carried out on different grounds (it is taken into account that the direction of the wind, then its strength, the time of the year in which it is observed, etc.), distinguish a different number of types of wind, and in some cases there are synonyms. If you try to give a summary picture of the most diverse dialects of the Russian language, then it will turn out to be even more motley and diverse. In addition to the previously named types of wind, other Russian dialects (in addition to them) distinguish:
strong wind - windy (Donsk), carminative (Krasnodar), windy (Onega), whirlwind (Sverdl.);
light wind - wind (Smolensk), windmills (Olonets), wind (Pskov, Tver);
cold piercing wind - Siberian (Astrakhan), chill (Vladimir);
cold winter wind - zimar (Novgorod);
whirlwind - whirling (Vladimirsk.);
side wind - kolyshen (Siberian);
wind from the lake - little lake (Belomorsk);
wind carrying ice away from the seashore - relative (Caspian);
wind from the upper reaches of the river - Verkhovik (Irkutsk, Siberian);
wind from the lower reaches of the river - nizovik (Krasnoyarsk), nizovets (Komi dialects), nizovka (Irkutsk, Siberian, Don);
the wind blowing parallel to the shore is a kosynya (Vladimirsk, Volga);
morning wind - lightning bolt (Yenisei);
the wind that brings rain clouds is a mokryak (Novgorod, Pskov).
There is no doubt that the semantic structure of the word contains information about the value system of the people - the native speaker, the cultural and historical experience of the people is stored, its special "reading" of the surrounding world is transmitted. As can be seen from the above examples, all this is presented differently in the language in different periods of its history and, moreover, is presented differently in different dialects and in the national language. It should also be clearly understood that the word is not only a carrier of knowledge, but also its source, and therefore plays such an important role in the cognition and description of non-linguistic reality. Without its participation, cognitive activity itself is impossible, the process of thinking cannot be realized, and it is in this sense that language really is an intermediary between the inner world of a person and objectively existing reality.
Currently, in many studies, special emphasis is placed on the reconstruction of the whole picture of the world of the Russian language. To do this, of course, it is necessary first to reconstruct its individual fragments according to both lexical and grammatical categories, units and their meanings. What are the methods by which one can reconstruct the picture of the world (both whole and its separate fragments) of any language?
One of the most popular methods of such reconstruction in our time is based on the analysis of the metaphorical compatibility of words with an abstract meaning, since language metaphor is one of the ways to express a kind of worldview contained in a particular language: the picture of the world cannot be a shorthand record of knowledge about the world or its mirror image, it is always a look at it through some kind of prism. Metaphors often play the role of this prism, because they allow us to consider something now known through what has already been known earlier, while coloring reality in a specific way.
Let us show on a specific example how this method is practically implemented when describing the semantics of words in the Russian language. If we look at the meanings of the Russian words grief and despair, reflections and memories, we will see that all the concepts referred to by the above words are associated with the image of a reservoir: grief and despair can be deep, and a person can plunge into reflections and memories. Apparently, the above-mentioned internal states make contact with the outside world inaccessible for a person - as if he were at the bottom of some reservoir. Reflections and memories can also rush like a wave, but the water element that arises here already represents other properties of these human states: now the idea of ​​the suddenness of their onset and the idea of ​​a person’s complete absorption by them are emphasized.
The study of linguistic metaphors allows us to find out to what extent metaphors in a particular language are an expression of the cultural preferences of a given society and, accordingly, reflect a certain linguistic picture of the world, and to what extent they embody the universal psychosomatic qualities of a person.
Another, no less popular and successful method of reconstructing the picture of the world is associated with the study and description of the so-called linguo-specific words, i.e. words that are not translated into other languages ​​or that have rather conventional or approximate analogues in other languages. In the study of such words, the notions or concepts contained in them, specific to a given language, are found, which in most cases are key to understanding a particular picture of the world. They often contain various stereotypes of linguistic, national and cultural consciousness.
Many researchers working in this direction prefer to use the method of comparison, since it is in comparison with other languages ​​that the specificity of the “semantic universe” (Anna Wierzhbitskaya’s expression) of the language of interest to us is most clearly visible. A. Vezhbitskaya rightly believes that there are concepts that are fundamental for the model of one language world and at the same time are generally absent in another, and therefore there are such thoughts that can be “thought” in this language, and even there are such feelings that can be experienced only within the framework of this linguistic consciousness, and they cannot be peculiar to any other consciousness and mentality. So, if we take the Russian concept of the soul, we can find its dissimilarity to the corresponding concept presented in the English-speaking world. For Russians, the soul is a receptacle for the main, if not all, events of emotional life and, in general, the entire inner world of a person: feelings, emotions, thoughts, desires, knowledge, thinking and speech abilities - all this (and in fact this is what usually happens hidden from human eyes) is concentrated in the Russian soul. The soul is our personality. And if our soul usually enters into opposition with the body in our consciousness, then in the Anglo-Saxon world the body usually contrasts with consciousness (mind), and not with the soul. This understanding of the world is manifested, among other things, in the translation of a number of Russian words into English: in particular, the Russian mentally ill is translated as mentally ill.
So, according to Vezhbitskaya, the word mind in the English language is as key to the Anglo-Saxon linguistic consciousness as the soul is to the Russian one, and it is precisely this word, including the sphere of the intellectual, that is in opposition to the body. As for the role of intellect in the Russian language picture of the world, it is very significant that in it this concept - the concept of intellect, consciousness, reason - in its significance, in principle, is not comparable with the soul: this is manifested, for example, in the richness of metaphors and idiomatics, associated with the concept of the soul. In general, the soul and body in Russian (and in general in Christian) culture are opposed to each other as high and low.
The study of linguo-specific words in their interconnection makes it possible already today to restore quite significant fragments of the Russian picture of the world, which are formed by a system of key concepts and invariant key ideas linking them. So, A.A. Zaliznyak, I.B. Levontina and A.D. Shmelev identify the following key ideas, or cross-cutting motives, of the Russian language picture of the world (of course, this list is not exhaustive, but suggests the possibility of supplementing and expanding it):
1) the idea of ​​the unpredictability of the world (it is contained in a number of Russian words and expressions, for example: what if, just in case, if anything, maybe; I’m going, I’ll try; managed; get; happiness);
2) the idea that the main thing is to get together, i.e. in order to implement something, it is necessary first of all to mobilize one's internal resources, and this is often difficult and not easy to do (to gather, at the same time);
3) the idea that a person can feel good inside if he has a large space outside; moreover, if this space is uninhabited, it rather creates internal discomfort (daring, will, expanse, scope, breadth, breadth of the soul, toil, restless, get there);
4) attention to the nuances of human relations (communication, relationships, reproach, resentment, native, separation, miss);
5) the idea of ​​justice (justice, truth, resentment);
6) the opposition "high - low" (life - being, truth - truth, duty - obligation, good - good, joy - pleasure);
7) the idea that it's good when other people know what a person feels (sincere, laughing, open-hearted);
8) the idea that it is bad when a person acts for reasons of practical benefit (prudent, petty, daring, scope).
As noted above, a special worldview is contained not only in the meanings of lexical units, but also embodied in the grammatical structure of the language. Let us now look at some grammatical categories from this point of view: how they are represented in different languages, what types of meanings they express, and how peculiarly non-linguistic reality is reflected in them.
In a number of languages ​​of the Caucasus, Southeast Asia, Africa, North America, Australia, nouns have such a category as a nominal class. All nouns in these languages ​​are divided into groups, or categories, depending on a variety of factors:
the logical correlation of the concept they designate (classes of people, animals, plants, things, etc. can be distinguished);
the magnitude of the objects they call (there are diminutive, magnifying classes);
quantities (there are classes of single objects, paired objects, classes of collective names, etc.);
shapes or configurations (there may be classes of words naming oblong, flat, round objects), etc.
The number of such named classes can vary from two to several dozen, depending on the language in which they are presented. So, in some Nakh-Dagestan languages, the following picture is observed. Three grammatical classes of names are distinguished according to a fairly simple and quite logical principle: people who differ in gender, and everything else (it does not matter whether they are living beings, objects, or some abstract concepts). So, for example, in the Kubachi dialect of the Dargin language, this division of nouns into three classes is manifested in the coordination of names that occupy the position of the subject in a sentence with verb-predicates using special prefixes - indicators of nominal classes: if the subject-name belongs to the class that names male people gender, the verb-predicate acquires the prefix indicator in-; if the subject denotes a female person, the verb is marked with the prefix j-; if the subject names not a person, the verb acquires the prefix b-.
In Chinese, the division into nominal classes is manifested in another kind of grammatical constructions - in combinations of nouns with numerals. Speaking in Chinese, you cannot directly connect these two words in speech: between them there must be a special counting word, or numerative. Moreover, the choice of one or another counting word is determined by the belonging of the noun to a particular class, i.e. in Chinese it is impossible to say two people, three cows, five books, but you need to pronounce (conditionally) two persons of a person, three cow heads, five book spines. From a European point of view, it is often completely incomprehensible why words denoting, for example, pens, cigarettes, pencils, poles, couplets of songs, detachments of soldiers, columns of people (all of them are combined with one counter word zhī " branch"), in another class the names of family members, pigs, vessels, bells and knives were combined (they require the counter word kǒu "mouth"), etc. Sometimes there is a completely rational explanation for this (for example, the word shuang "pair" is considered to be paired objects, and the word zhang "leaf" - objects that have a flat surface: tables, walls, letters, sheets of paper, faces or parts of them), sometimes it is even native speakers cannot explain (for example, why housing and typos or errors in the text are considered the same word chǔ; or why Buddha statues and cannons are considered the same word zūn). But there is nothing surprising in this state of affairs, since we also cannot explain why in Russian a knife, a table, a house are masculine, and a fork, a school desk, a hut are feminine. It's just that in our picture of the world they are seen this way and not otherwise.
Can such linguistic vision mean anything to speakers of that language? Certainly yes. In some cases, it can determine the behavior and worldview of native speakers of this language and in a certain way even correct the direction of their thinking. Thus, several decades ago, American psychologists conducted a rather simple but convincing experiment with young children who spoke the Navajo language (one of the many languages ​​of North American Indians) and with English-speaking children of the same age. Children were presented with objects of different colors, different sizes and different shapes (for example, red, yellow, blue, green sticks, ropes, balls, sheets of paper, etc.) so that they distributed these objects into different groups. The English-speaking children took into account mainly the color factor, and the children of the Navajo tribe (where there is a grammatical category of the nominal class), distributing objects into different groups, first of all paid attention to their size and shape. Thus, a certain worldview, embedded in the grammatical structure of the Navajo language and the English language, controlled the behavior and thinking of babies who knew one language or another.
If you look at the category of number, you can also see a number of peculiar ways of perceiving the world that are embedded in it. The point here is not only that there are languages ​​where a different number of grammes will be opposed to each other. As you know, in most languages ​​of the world there are two grammes - singular and plural; in a number of ancient languages ​​(Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, Old Slavonic) and in some modern languages ​​(classical Arabic, Koryak, Sami, Samoyed, etc.) there were or are three grammes - singular, dual and plural; in a very small number of world languages, in addition to the previous three, there is also a triple number (for example, in some Papuan languages); and in one of the Austronesian languages ​​(Sursurunga), personal pronouns even have a quadruple number. That is, someone perceives as "a lot" what is more than one, someone - as what is more than two or three or even four. Already in this numerical opposition, a different worldview is manifested. But there are also more interesting things. So, in some Polynesian, Dagestan, Indian languages, the so-called spider number (from the Latin paucus "few") is found, denoting a certain small number of objects (up to a maximum of seven), opposed to the singular, plural, and sometimes dual (for example, in the language Hopi North American Indians) numbers. That is, Hopi speakers think something like this: one, two, a few (but not a lot), a lot.
Sometimes there are very unexpected uses of different forms of grammatical number. So, in Hungarian, paired (by their nature) objects can be used in the singular form: szem ‘pair of eyes’ (singular), but fel szem ‘eye’ literally means ‘half an eye’. Those. here the unit of account is a pair. In Breton, the dual indicator daou- can be combined with the plural indicator - où: lagad ‘(one) eye’ - daoulagad ‘pair of eyes’ - daoulagadoù ‘several pairs of eyes’. Apparently, in the Breton language there are two grammatical categories - pairs and plurals. Therefore, they can be combined within the same word, without mutually excluding each other. In some languages ​​(for example, Budukh, widespread on the territory of Azerbaijan), there are two plural variants - compact (or dotted) and distant (or distributive). The first number, as opposed to the second, indicates that a certain set of objects is concentrated in one place or functions as a whole. So, in the Budukh language, fingers of one hand and fingers on different hands or on different people will be used with different plural endings; wheels of one car or wheels of different cars, etc.
As can be seen from the above examples, even the same grammatical categories of different languages ​​show their speakers the world from different points of view, allow them to see or not see some features of individual objects or phenomena of non-linguistic reality, identify them or, conversely, distinguish them. In this (including) a special worldview is manifested, inherent in each specific language picture of the world.
The study of the linguistic picture of the world is currently relevant for solving the problems of translation and communication, since translation is carried out not just from one language to another language, but from one culture to another. Even the concept of speech culture is now interpreted quite broadly: it is understood not only as the observance of specific language norms, but also as the ability of the speaker to correctly formulate his own thoughts and adequately interpret the speech of the interlocutor, which in some cases also requires knowledge and awareness of the specifics of one or another worldview, concluded in linguistic forms.
The concept of a linguistic picture of the world also plays an important role in applied research related to solving problems within the framework of artificial intelligence theories: it has now become clear that understanding a natural language by a computer requires understanding the knowledge and ideas about the world structured in this language, which is often associated not only with logical reasoning or with a large amount of knowledge and experience, but also with the presence in each language of peculiar metaphors - not just linguistic ones, but metaphors that are forms of thoughts and require correct interpretations.
A.D. Shmelev. Spirit, soul and body in the light of the data of the Russian language // A.A. Zaliznyak, I.B. Levontina, A.D. Shmelev. Key ideas of the Russian language picture of the world. M., 2005, pp. 148-149.
For the first time, this particular worldview was discovered by American anthropologists in the 1950s. XX century. See: M. Bates, D. Abbott. Ifaluk Island. M., 1967.
See: V.A. Plungyan. On the description of the African "naive picture of the world" (localization of sensations and understanding in the Dogon language) // Logical analysis of natural language. cultural concepts. M., 1991, pp. 155-160.

E. Sapir. The status of linguistics as a science // E. Sapir. Selected works on linguistics and cultural studies. M., 1993, p. 261.
B. Whorf. Science and linguistics // Foreign linguistics. I. M., 1999, pp. 97-98.
Cit. by: O.A. Radchenko. Language as a universe. Linguo-philosophical concept of neo-Humboldtianism. M., 2006, p. 235.
This example is given according to the above-mentioned book by O.A. Radchenko, p. 213.
A.A. Potebnya. Thought and language // A.A. Potebnya. Word and myth. M., 1989, p. 156.
A.A. Potebnya. From notes on the theory of literature // A.A. Potebnya. Word and myth. M., 1989, p. 238.
A.A. Potebnya. On some symbols in Slavic folk poetry // A.A. Potebnya. Word and myth. M., 1989, p. 285.
Dictionary of Russian folk dialects. M.-L., 1965-1997, v. 1-31;
Dictionary of meteorological lexicon of Oryol dialects. Eagle, 1996;
V.I.Dal. Explanatory dictionary of the living Great Russian language. M., 1989, vol. 1-4.
V.I.Dal. Explanatory dictionary of the living Great Russian language. M., 1989. Volume 1, pp. 452-453.
The example is taken from the article by Anna Zaliznyak "Linguistic picture of the world", which is presented in the electronic encyclopedia "Krugosvet": http://www.krugosvet.ru/enc/gumanitarnye_nauki/lingvistika .
There are a number of works by A. Vezhbitskaya, translated into Russian, dedicated to this issue:
A. Vezhbitskaya. Language. Culture. Cognition. M., 1996;
A. Vezhbitskaya. Semantic universals and description of languages. M., 1999;
A. Vezhbitskaya. Understanding cultures through keywords. M., 2001;
A. Vezhbitskaya. Comparison of cultures through vocabulary and pragmatics. M., 2001.
A.A. Zaliznyak, I.B. Levontina and A.D. Shmelev. Key ideas of the Russian language picture of the world. M., 2005, p. 11.
Here and below, typical Russian concepts are indicated in italics, illustrating, according to the authors, one or another through motif of the Russian picture of the world.
More details about this are written in the book: D. Slobin, J. Green. Psycholinguistics. M., 1976, pp. 212-214.
It is very curious that, according to developmental psychology, children of this age normally begin to operate with the concept of color rather than form.

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The concept of JKM goes back to the ideas of W. von Humboldt and neo-Humboldians about the internal form of language, on the one hand, and to the ideas of American ethnolinguistics, in particular, to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity, on the other.

W. von Humboldt was one of the first linguists who drew attention to the national content of language and thinking, noting that "different languages ​​are for the nation the organs of their original thinking and perception" . Each person has a subjective image of a certain object, which does not completely coincide with the image of the same object in another person. This representation can be objectified only by making "a way for itself through the mouth into the external world." The word, therefore, carries a load of subjective ideas, the differences of which are within certain limits, since their carriers are members of the same linguistic community, have a certain national character and consciousness. According to W. von Humboldt, it is language that influences the formation of a system of concepts and a system of values. These functions, as well as the ways of forming concepts with the help of language, are considered common to all languages. The differences are based on the originality of the spiritual image of the peoples - native speakers, but the main dissimilarity of the languages ​​\u200b\u200btogether lies in the form of the language itself, "in the ways of expressing thoughts and feelings".

W. von Humboldt considers language as an "intermediate world" between thinking and reality, while language fixes a special national worldview. W. von Humboldt emphasizes the difference between the concepts of "intermediate world" and "picture of the world". The first is a static product of linguistic activity, which determines the perception of reality by a person. Its unit is a "spiritual object" - a concept. The picture of the world is a mobile, dynamic entity, since it is formed from linguistic interventions in reality. Its unit is the speech act.

Thus, in the formation of both concepts, a huge role belongs to the language: “Language is an organ that forms a thought, therefore, in the formation of a human personality, in the formation of a system of concepts in it, in appropriating the experience accumulated by generations, language plays a leading role” .

The merit of L. Weisgerber lies in the fact that he introduced the concept of "linguistic picture of the world" into the scientific terminological system. This concept determined the originality of his linguo-philosophical concept, along with the "intermediate world" and "energy" of language.

The main characteristics of the linguistic picture of the world, which L. Weisgerber gives it, are the following:

1. the linguistic picture of the world is a system of all possible contents: spiritual, which determine the uniqueness of the culture and mentality of a given linguistic community, and linguistic, which determine the existence and functioning of the language itself,

2. the linguistic picture of the world, on the one hand, is a consequence of the historical development of the ethnos and language, and, on the other hand, is the cause of a peculiar path for their further development,

3. The linguistic picture of the world as a single "living organism" is clearly structured and is multi-level in linguistic terms. It defines a special set of sounds and sound combinations, structural features of the articulatory apparatus of native speakers, prosodic characteristics of speech, vocabulary, word-formation capabilities of the language and the syntax of phrases and sentences, as well as its own paremiological baggage. In other words, the linguistic picture of the world determines the total communicative behavior, understanding of the external world of nature and the inner world of man and the language system,

4. the linguistic picture of the world is changeable in time and, like any "living organism", is subject to development, that is, in the vertical (diachronic) sense, it is partly non-identical to itself at each subsequent stage of development,

5. the linguistic picture of the world creates the homogeneity of the linguistic essence, contributing to the consolidation of linguistic, and hence its cultural originality in the vision of the world and its designation by means of language,

6. the linguistic picture of the world exists in a homogeneous, peculiar self-consciousness of the linguistic community and is transmitted to subsequent generations through a special worldview, rules of conduct, lifestyle, imprinted by means of language,

7. the picture of the world of any language is that transformative power of the language, which forms the idea of ​​the surrounding world through the language as an “intermediate world” among the native speakers of this language,

8. The linguistic picture of the world of a particular linguistic community is its general cultural heritage.

The perception of the world is carried out by thinking, but with the participation of the means of the native language. L. Weisgerber's way of reflecting reality is idioethnic in nature and corresponds to the static form of the language. In fact, the scientist emphasizes the intersubjective part of the individual’s thinking: “There is no doubt that many of the views and ways of behavior and attitudes that are rooted in us turn out to be “learned”, that is, socially conditioned, as soon as we trace the scope of their manifestation around the world” .

Language as an activity is also considered in the works of L. Wittgenstein, devoted to research in the field of philosophy and logic. According to this scientist, thinking has a speech character and is an activity with signs. L. Wittgenstein puts forward the following proposition: life is given to a sign by its use. At the same time, "the meaning that is inherent in words is not a product of our thinking." The meaning of a sign is its application in accordance with the rules of a given language and the characteristics of a particular activity, situation, context. Therefore, one of the most important issues for L. Wittgenstein is the relationship between the grammatical structure of the language, the structure of thinking and the structure of the displayed situation. A sentence is a model of reality that copies its structure with its logical-syntactic form. Therefore, to what extent a person speaks the language, to that extent he knows the world. A linguistic unit is not a certain linguistic meaning, but a concept, therefore L. Wittgenstein does not distinguish between a linguistic picture of the world and a picture of the world as a whole.

A fundamental contribution to the distinction between the concepts of a world picture and a linguistic picture of the world was made by E. Sapir and B. Whorf, who argued that “the idea that a person is oriented in the outside world, essentially, without the help of language and that language is just an accidental means of solving specific tasks of thinking and communication - this is just an illusion. In fact, the "real world" is largely unconsciously built on the basis of the language habits of a particular social group. Using the combination “real world”, E. Sapir means “intermediate world”, including language with all its connections with thinking, psyche, culture, social and professional phenomena. That is why E. Sapir argues that “it becomes difficult for a modern linguist to confine himself to his traditional subject ... he cannot but share the mutual interests that connect linguistics with anthropology and cultural history, with sociology, psychology, philosophy and, in a longer perspective, with physiology and physics".

Modern ideas about JKM are as follows.

Language is a fact of culture, an integral part of the culture that we inherit, and at the same time its tool. The culture of the people is verbalized in the language, it is the language that accumulates the key concepts of culture, broadcasting them in a symbolic embodiment - words. The model of the world created by the language is a subjective image of the objective world, it carries the features of the human way of understanding the world, i.e. anthropocentrism that permeates the entire language.

This point of view is shared by V.A. Maslova: “The linguistic picture of the world is the general cultural heritage of the nation, it is structured, multi-level. It is the linguistic picture of the world that determines communicative behavior, understanding the external world and the inner world of a person. It reflects the way of speech and thought activity, characteristic of a particular era, with its spiritual, cultural and national values.

E.S. Yakovleva understands JKM as fixed in the language and specific to the world - it is a kind of worldview through the prism of language.

"The linguistic picture of the world" is "taken in its entirety, all the conceptual content of a given language".

The concept of a naive linguistic picture of the world, according to D.Yu. Apresyan, “represents the ways of perceiving and conceptualizing the world reflected in the natural language, when the basic concepts of the language are formed into a single system of views, a kind of collective philosophy, which is imposed as a must on all native speakers.

The linguistic picture of the world is "naive" in the sense that in many essential respects it differs from the "scientific" picture. At the same time, the naive ideas reflected in the language are by no means primitive: in many cases they are no less complex and interesting than scientific ones. Such, for example, are ideas about the inner world of a person, which reflect the experience of introspection of dozens of generations over many millennia and are capable of serving as a reliable guide to this world.

The language picture of the world, as G.V. Kolshansky notes, is based on the peculiarities of the social and labor experience of each nation. Ultimately, these features find their expression in the differences in the lexical and grammatical nomination of phenomena and processes, in the compatibility of certain meanings, in their etymology (the choice of the initial feature in the nomination and formation of the meaning of the word), etc. in the language “the whole variety of creative cognitive activity of a person (social and individual) is fixed”, which lies precisely in the fact that “in accordance with the boundless number of conditions that are a stimulus in his directed cognition, each time he chooses and fixes one of the countless properties of objects and phenomena and their connections. It is this human factor that is clearly visible in all language formations, both in the norm and in its deviations and individual styles.

So, the concept of LCM includes two interconnected, but different ideas: 1) the picture of the world offered by the language differs from the “scientific” one, and 2) each language draws its own picture, depicting reality in a slightly different way than other languages ​​do. The reconstruction of LCM is one of the most important tasks of modern linguistic semantics. The study of the JCM is carried out in two directions, in accordance with the named two components of this concept. On the one hand, based on a systemic semantic analysis of the vocabulary of a particular language, a complete system of representations reflected in a given language is reconstructed, regardless of whether it is specific to a given language or universal, reflecting a “naive” view of the world as opposed to a “scientific” one. On the other hand, separate language-specific (linguo-specific) concepts are studied, which have two properties: they are “key” for a given culture (in the sense that they give a “key” to its understanding) and at the same time the corresponding words are poorly translated into other languages. : a translation equivalent is either completely absent (as, for example, for Russian words longing, anguish, maybe, daring, will, restless, sincerity, ashamed, insulting, uncomfortable), or such an equivalent exists in principle, but it does not contain exactly those components of the meaning , which are specific for a given word (such, for example, are the Russian words soul, fate, happiness, justice, vulgarity, separation, resentment, pity, morning, gather, get, as it were).

Literature

1. Apresyan Yu.D. Integral description of the language and systemic lexicography. "Languages ​​of Russian culture". Selected works / Yu.D. Apresyan. M.: School, 1995. V.2.

2. Weisgerber Y.L. Language and Philosophy // Questions of Linguistics, 1993. No. 2

3. Wingenstein L. Philosophical works. Part 1. M., 1994.

4. Humbold V. Background. Language and philosophy of culture. Moscow: Progress, 1985.

5. Karaulov Yu.N. General and Russian ideography. M.: Nauka, 1996. 264 p.

6. Kolshansky G.V. An objective picture of the world in cognition and language. M.: Nauka, 1990. 103 p.

7. Maslova V.A. Introduction to cognitive linguistics. – M.: Flinta: Nauka, 2007. 296 p.

8. Sapir E. Selected works on linguistics and cultural studies. M. Publishing group "Progress - Univers", 1993. 123 p.

9. Sukalenko N.I. Reflection of everyday consciousness in the figurative language picture of the world. Kyiv: Naukova Dumka, 1992. 164 p.

10. Yakovleva E.S. Fragments of the Russian language picture of the world // Questions of linguistics, 1994. No. 5. pp.73-89.

In the science of language, studies of the so-called language picture of the world are becoming increasingly popular. Linguists believe that people's view of the world is to some extent determined by the language they speak. The great German scientist Wilhelm von Humboldt wrote almost two hundred years ago: “Each language describes a circle around the people to which it belongs, from which a person can only leave insofar as he immediately enters the circle of another language.”

There are a lot of examples. One of the manifestations of this "circle" is a certain division of the surrounding world. Anyone who has studied English or French knows that the Russian word hand in these languages, two non-synonymous words correspond: English hand and arm, French main and bras. If a hand and main can be called brush, then the other two words do not seem to have exact Russian equivalents.

And the further the language is from Russian, the greater the differences. For example, how would you say in Japanese give? The question does not have a clear answer: there are as many as five suitable verbs in Japanese. If I give something to another, one must use some verbs, and if someone gives to me, the verbs will be different. Another parameter on which the choice of word depends is the degree of respect towards the recipient. And the Russian word water There are two words in Japanese: mizu for cold and Yu for hot water.

Linguists believe that people's view of the world is to some extent determined by the language they speak.

Another manifestation of the "circle" is the significance of the word in the language. There are words that are used frequently, have figurative meanings, form stable phrases, sound in proverbs and sayings - meaningful words. At the same time, they differ greatly from language to language: a word that is constantly present in the Russian lexicon can be very rare for a native speaker of another language.

I once observed how a group of Japanese tourists, seeing goats, tried for a long time to remember the names of these animals. People really suffered, trying to find the right word in their memory. Finally one of them exclaimed: Yagi. How much joy!

In the Russian language picture of the world and goat, and especially goat are much more prominent. Why is this happening? In the case of goats, it is clear that there is little pasture in mountainous Japan, and cattle breeding has never been particularly developed. But why, for example, are there so many onomatopoeias in Japanese? The Japanese author of one of the Japanese-Russian dictionaries was looking for a translation for a fairly often used onomatopoeia that conveys snoring, and found: phi pua. It is unlikely that any of the readers will remember this word, although it is taken from the story of A.P. Chekhov. Apparently, the writer came up with a word, but it was not fixed in the language.

A word that is constantly present in the Russian lexicon can be very rare for a native speaker of another language.

Language can form a positive or negative assessment of objects and phenomena. In Russian, figurative meanings, set phrases, proverbs associated with dog are usually negatively stained. This reflects the traditional view of this animal as unclean in a number of religions, including Christianity.

Once upon a time, academician Dmitry Likhachev compiled a dictionary of curses from Ivan the Terrible in correspondence with Kurbsky, and more than half of them turned out to be “dog-like”. However, just this example shows that the linguistic picture of the world and public consciousness are far from always identical. Over the past 100–200 years, the attitude of native speakers of the Russian language towards dogs has changed for the better, but the old assessments have largely been preserved in the language.

The linguistic picture of the world, of course, can also change, but this happens more slowly. Differences can manifest themselves at the level of literary language and dialects. But in principle, a linguistic picture (“worldview”, as Humboldt wrote) is not the same as a worldview. And a liberal, and a conservative, and a communist, if their native language is Russian, will be called water the corresponding liquid of any temperature and distinguish by the meaning of the word wash and wash although English to wash- one verb. For example, Vladimir Lenin and Nikolai Berdyaev, with a significant difference in worldview, had the same worldview as carriers of the literary Russian language of one generation.

Once academician Dmitry Likhachev compiled a dictionary of Ivan the Terrible's curses in correspondence with Kurbsky, and more than half of them turned out to be "dog"

Now, both in Russia and in other countries, worldview and worldview are often confused, and overwhelming tasks are set before the study of linguistic pictures of the world. One of the reasons, in my opinion, is that researchers are attracted by global problems, for example, “the connection of many actual communicative moments with moral categories, assessments, evaluative activities,” which determines “the specifics of Russian communication,” as one of our very serious linguist Vadim Dementiev writes . He further concludes: Russian soul, according to Russian proverbs, phraseological units, texts of Russian classical literature, an excessively logical and rational attitude to life is contraindicated.

It is not difficult to give supporting examples (which the author does), but how representative are they? And what is the “Russian soul”, how does it compare with the Russian language? And how does the "Russian soul" relate to the dog? It seems that morality cannot be determined by language. But I really want to find the key to Russian morality...

Other, also serious authors consider the key concepts for the Russian-speaking culture longing and prowess, and for the English language - happiness(happy). The Japanese explain the abundance of onomatopoeia in their language by the fact that they are closer to nature than, for example, Americans and Europeans. But how to prove all this? There are even too many facts to study language pictures, but how to select these facts? There is no scientific method for this yet, and will there ever be?

When considering the picture of the world, one cannot fail to mention the linguistic aspect, which goes back to the ideas of the German philosopher, educator, public and statesman, diplomat Friedrich Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) and his neo-Humboldtian followers, among whom the German linguist, a specialist in the field of linguistics, should be especially noted. Johann Leo Weisgerber (1899–1985). At the same time, however, it should be said that ideas about the linguistic picture of the world are based on the ideas of American ethnolinguists, in particular, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity (for more details, see below).

The concept of a linguistic picture of the world

W. Humboldt (Fig. 2.1) believed that language creates an intermediate world between the human community and reality through a system of its concepts.

“Each language,” he wrote, “forms a kind of sphere around the people, which must be left in order to enter the sphere of another people. Therefore, the study of a foreign language should always be the acquisition of a new point of view of the world.”

Rice. 2.1.Friedrich Wilhelm von Humboldt, German philosopher and public figure

Rice. 2.2. Johann Leo Weisgerber, German linguist, specialist in linguistics

A follower of W. Humboldt, Leo Weisgerber (Fig. 2.2), noted the stimulating role of language in relation to the formation of a single picture of the world in a person. He believed that "language allows a person to combine all experience into a single picture of the world and makes him forget how earlier, before he learned the language, he perceived the world around him" . It was L. Weisgerber who introduced the concept of a linguistic picture of the world into anthropology and semiotics, and the term itself was first used in one of the works of an Austrian scientist, philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), which was called "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" (1921).

According to L. Weisgerber, "the vocabulary of a particular language includes, in general, along with the totality of linguistic signs, also the totality of conceptual mental means that the language community has; and as each native speaker studies this dictionary, all members of the language community master these mental means; in this sense, we can say that the possibility of a native language lies in the fact that it contains in its concepts a certain picture of the world and transmits it to all members of the linguistic community.

The relationship of culture, language and human consciousness attracts the attention of many scientists. Over the past 20 years, research has been carried out on the linguistic picture of the world among native speakers of a certain language, and the features of the perception of reality within the framework of a particular culture have been actively studied. Among the scientists who addressed these problems in their works are the outstanding Soviet and Russian philosophers, culturologists, linguists M. S. Kagan, L. V. Shcherba and many others.

According to the famous philosopher, culturologist Moses Samoilovich Kagan (1921–2006), "culture needs a multitude of languages ​​precisely because its information content is multilaterally rich and each specific information process needs adequate means of implementation" .

Academician, Soviet and Russian linguist Lev Vladimirovich Shcherba (1880-1944) expressed the idea that "the world that is given to us in our direct experience, remaining the same everywhere, is comprehended in different ways in different languages, even in those spoken by peoples that represent a certain unity with cultural point of view".

Soviet linguist and psychologist Nikolay Ivanovich Zhinkin (1893–1979), like many other researchers, notes the relationship between language and the picture of the world. He writes: "Language is an integral part of culture and its tool, it is the reality of our spirit, the face of culture; it expresses in the naked form the specific features of the national mentality. Language is a mechanism that opened up a field of consciousness for a person."

Under language picture of the world understand the totality of knowledge about the world that is reflected in the language, as well as ways to obtain and interpret new knowledge.

Modern ideas about the linguistic picture of the world are set out in the works Yuri Derenik Apresyan (b. 1930). According to his scientific views, "each natural language reflects a certain way of perceiving and organizing the world. The meanings expressed in it add up to a certain unified system of views, a kind of collective philosophy, which is imposed as a mandatory requirement on all native speakers<...>On the other hand, the linguistic picture of the world is “naive” in the sense that in many essential respects it differs from the “scientific” picture. At the same time, the naive ideas reflected in the language are by no means primitive: in many cases they are no less complex and interesting than scientific. Such, for example, are ideas about the inner world of man, which reflect the experience of introspection of tens of generations over many millennia and are capable of serving as a reliable guide to this world ".

Thus, the interrelation of language and the picture of the world that develops in the mind of the individual becomes obvious. That is why many modern linguists distinguish between the concepts of "picture of the world" and "linguistic picture of the world".

Comparing the picture of the world and the linguistic picture of the world, E. S. Kubryakova noted: "The picture of the world - how a person draws the world in his imagination - is a more complex phenomenon than the linguistic picture of the world, i.e. that part of the conceptual world of a person, which has a "binding" to the language and is refracted through linguistic forms" .

A similar idea was expressed in the works of V. A. Maslova, who believes that “the term “language picture of the world” is nothing more than a metaphor, because in reality the specific features of the national language, which record the unique socio-historical experience of a certain national community of people, create for the speakers of this language not some other, unique picture of the world, different from the objectively existing one, but only a specific “color” of this world, due to the national significance of objects, phenomena, processes, a selective attitude towards them, which is born by the specifics of activity, lifestyle and national culture of a given people.

The linguistic picture of the world is the image of consciousness - reality reflected by the means of language. The linguistic picture of the world is usually distinguished from the conceptual or cognitive models of the world, which are the basis of the linguistic embodiment, the verbal conceptualization of the totality of human knowledge about the world.

Thus, it becomes clear that the picture of the world of any individual, as well as the picture of the world of the whole community, is in close connection with the language. Language is the most important way of formation and existence of human knowledge about the world. Reflecting the objective world in the process of activity, a person fixes the results of cognition in the language.

What is the difference between cultural, conceptual, value and language pictures of the world? If the cultural (conceptual) picture of the world is a reflection of the real world through the prism of concepts formed in the process of cognition of the world by a person on the basis of both collective and individual experience, then the linguistic picture of the world reflects reality through the cultural picture of the world, and language subjugates, organizes perception world by its bearers. At the same time, the cultural and linguistic pictures of the world have much in common. The cultural picture of the world is specific to each culture that arises in certain natural and social conditions that distinguish it from other cultures. The linguistic picture of the world is closely connected with culture, is in continuous interaction with it, goes back to the real world that surrounds a person.

If we compare the linguistic and conceptual pictures of the world, then the conceptual picture of the world is a system of ideas, human knowledge about the world around us, a mental reflection of the cultural experience of the nation, while the linguistic picture of the world is its verbal embodiment.

If we compare the value and language pictures of the world, then the first equally contains universal and specific components. In the language, it is represented by value judgments adopted in accordance with national codes and well-known case statements and texts.

Researchers have different approaches to the consideration of the national and cultural specifics of certain aspects or fragments of the picture of the world. Some take language as the initial concept, analyze the similarities or differences in the perception of the world through the prism of linguistic consistency, and in this case we are talking about the linguistic picture of the world. For other scientists, culture, the linguistic consciousness of members of a certain linguocultural community are the starting points, and the image of the world is in the center of attention, which brings to the fore the concept of "cultural picture of the world". In general, both linguistic and cultural pictures of the world answer the most important worldview question about the essence of man and his place in the world. It is on the solution of this issue that our value orientations, goals, and direction of our development depend.