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Mind in the Russian language consciousness is presented primarily as a mobile mental, ethical and emotional essence of the person. The paper examines some types of inner speech – during creative thinking, the memories and falling asleep. The study suggests that the main cognitive model, followed by cognitive human activity, marked with the word mind is the model of the Rootstock / Rhizome.
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The paper presents the cognitive taxonomy of constructions focusing on the relationship between the English present progressive construction and the constructions preceding it. The theoretical aspect of the cognitive model for acquiring the present progressive construction is based on Tomasello's usage-based theory, Croft's construction grammar and Goldberg's cognitive grammar. The main principle is that learners process the language relying explicitly on cognitive skills that they are known to possess. The methodological aspect is expressed through the use of the lingua-didactic model. Intralingual and interlingual interference play an important role in SLA and explain some of the reasons for the errors of Bulgarians learning English.
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The article discusses the status of reading in Bulgarian schools in relation to problems such as lack of importance attached to reading by students, low levels of interest and lack of motivation. This relates not only to reading in English, but to reading in general as an intellectual activity concerned with the acquisition of knowledge. It is reflected in the inability of teachers to develop reading skills and good reading habits among students. The survey on extensive and intensive reading shows that the majority of students do not read much out of class and the teacher uses classroom practices which do not lead to the development of effective reading skills, by for example failing to make good use of prediction, activating students’ background knowledge before reading a text, or developing skimming and scanning sub-skills.
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The problem of meaning of proper names has been discussed both by philosophers and linguists. There are two main theories about name meaning: the total meaningfulness theory and the total meaninglessness theory. Modern linguistics, however, deals not only with the presence or absence of linguistic meaning in proper names, but with the specific kinds of meaning that proper names can possibly have.
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This paper presents a short corpus-based analysis of the verb “seem”. The verbs are very important components of the language and they have received much linguistic attention. The verb “seem” is one of the linking verbs. The definitions for this paper are from Longman online, Macmillan online, and Collins COBUILD English Dictionary and the corpus is extracted from the British National Corpus (BNC). The verb “seem” is analyzed in terms of different syntactic structures of use.
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The article deals with the metaphor of THEATRE used in the British and the Bulgarian media. The focus is on its variations in representing different events depending on their importance to the corresponding culture. Three different cases are further differentiated according to whether the events are identical or similar and whether there is a difference in the metaphors used to present these events.
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Substitution is one of the cohesive devices in text. It is a lexicogrammatical relation and the different types are defined grammatically. This paper aims at analyzing the text-forming role of the verbal substitute „do”, functioning as a sort of „counter”, contributing to the semantic structure of text without disturbing its informational organization. The verbal substitute is typically used when the speaker/writer wants to contrast two verbal groups.
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The purpose of this paper is to analyze particles in phrasal verbs, namely over, and to show that these particles are cognate both to prepositions and prefixes used for word formation. We provide evidence from polysemy – the case where a lexical item has a number of related senses. We also use cognate words9, such as the spatial particle over and the prefix over-, to flow over and to overflow, to turn over and to overturn, etc. We aim to reveal that there are principles relating the different senses of one lexical item. What is more, the same principles apply to relating the senses of cognate lexical items. Finding such general principles helps turning theoretical linguistics in scientific enterprise.
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Learning is no longer seen as a linear accumulation, as the acquisition of automation through a mechanism of type of "stimulus response "or" trial and error", but as a process of knowledge construction by individual, is therefore precisely this dynamic construction of knowledge by the subject and those with whom it interacts through actions of a situated than we are interested.
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”German scholars have been the most active in the field of translation studies and have produced a very large and influential body of literature on the subject.” This quotation from Baker‘s Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (London: Routledge 1998:426) is still valid as the publications of the last two years confirm. But as a teacher of translation in foreign countries we were very often confronted with the fact that few people understand the German language and were very thankful for an introduction to the German literature of translation studies. And since the head of the department of LMA asked us to report on German publications, we decided to create a special rubrique for this purpose. This year it is dedicated to the benefits translations studies get from recent research in cognitive science.
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The article aims to describe two images or views of friendship in Danish. The data, excerpted from dictionaries (lexical definitions, synonyms, antonyms, hyperonyms, derivatives, and compounds) and from the National Corpus of Danish, show that there exist two parallel images of friendship in the language: one is connected with a more traditional understanding of friendship as a strong and close bond, the other is based on the idea of many acquaintances/friends. Corpus data suggest that it is the other, more recent image of friendship that is now most frequently evoked by speakers of Danish, although the traditional view is still present in their consciousness. This conclusion is corroborated by an analysis of the word ven, the main lexical exponent of the cultural concept being investigated.
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The article follows the methodology of the Axiological Lexicon of Slavs and their Neighbours in analysing the French cultural concept of santé ‘health’. The concept has been analysed on the basis of systemic (lexicographic) data, questionnaires, and texts. They propose a shortened cognitive definition, where santé is defined as a state or the functioning of an organism or a group (sometimes also another living organism, organisation, or process); it has a physical, psychological, and/or intellectual dimension; it is an equilibrium. When one has santé, it is not noticed: a person feels well. However, its absence is noticed, when one becomes ill. Santé is strength, goodness (wealth), the possibility of doing many things. In order to maintain santé, one must do many things. The environment can have a positive and negative effect on it. In contemporary French journalistic discourse santé is not only an individual but also a social value: health is in the field of interest of state authorities and international organisations. It is a good in its own right but although it is natural, it is not given once and for all: one must make an effort to have it.
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The study proposes an analysis of selected ethnic stereotypes (of Tartars, Cossacks, Swedes, and Turks) couched within the framework of Jerzy Bartmiński’s cognitive definition. The analysis is based on data from dictionaries of standard and dialectal Polish, texts of folklore and records of beliefs. A reconstruction of images of foreign invaders makes it possible to capture and verify the parameters of memory identified by Wojciech Chlebda. The holder of memory, in the light of the data analysed, is the guardian of Polish history, a Catholic Pole who trusts in the protection of Virgin Mary and relates the events from a distance (but with a considerable degree of engagement and sympathy). The content of memory are the relations between Poles and other nations. It is characterised by, among others, a-historicity, simplification, fantasising, sporadic reference to facts, people, and places. History functions as the background for presenting the canon of one’s values and assessment of events. The aim and function of memory is also discussed: accounts of invasions facilitated integration, helped identify “us” and “them”, or develop attitudes towards the invaders.
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In this article the author synthetically surveys the most important problems of linguistic “humanisation of reality”. Various aspects and forms of anthropocentrism are analysed on the basis of linguistic data, texts of folklore, belief tales, and ritualised practices. Anthropocentrism is viewed from the inside (from humans to the world) but also from the outside (from the world to humans). This is because humans not only make the world familiar to themselves by imprinting their mark on it: they also measure themselves to the world of animals, plants, or artefacts. Two aspects are thus discussed of the reciprocal relations between humans and animals, plants, wildlife, and matter, with a focus on linguistic and cultural markers of humanising the latter, contrasted with humans being assimilated to those aspects of reality. Two aspects are also discussed of the relation between humans and the world of the divine and the demonic, with a focus on the linguistic and cultural exponents of the humanisation of demons, God, and saints vs. the demonisation and deification of humans. Finally, referring to the contrasting views of Vyacheslav Ivanov (who accepts the anthropic world order and the idea of anthropocentrism in its theological aspect) and Miriana Detelić (for whom the maxim of man being “the measure of all things” is harmful, for it justifies the destruction of biosphere on the cosmic scale), the author claims that the problems of locating humans in the world and establishing the boundaries between humans and other inhabitants of the Universe are topical also in this day and age.
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The aim of the study is to highlight the role and place of those language elements that, in the overall scheme of the linguistic worldview, are traditionally referred to as grammatical. We, thus, side with those linguistic conceptions that assume that grammar and lexicon constitute a continuum of symbolic structures. The key operational tool/notion is that of cognitive equivalence, with grammatical conceptualization (grammaticalization) and lexical conceptualization (lexicalization) being the two equivalent ways, or two complementary cognitive tasks, of expressing conceptualizations in language. In the analytical part of the article, the paradigm of the linguistic worldview comes to the fore, and it is within its premises that the research question of how futurity happens to be conceptualized in selected languages is attempted. The examples come from English, Polish, and several other European languages.
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The study is based on the assumption that human cognition is closely linked with natural language. One can therefore ask what conceptual content has found its way into linguistic expression, in what form it is expressed, and what motivates that expression.The study is concerned with the linguistic manifestation of the concept of number (one of the most important categories of human thinking), through grammatical (morphological, syntactic and lexical), highly conventionalised means. Elementary numerical meanings encoded in Polish include ‘one’ and ‘more than one’ (in former stages of the language also ‘two’), corresponding to first numerical concepts comprehensible to humans (both in the historical and the individual sense). Those meanings are obligatorily expressed by all speakers of Polish and their markers are inflectional morphemes that play a role – in accordance with the norm – in all inflected parts of speech. That numerical opposition is also broadly expressed at the world-formational plane: there exist special morphemes that code the singularity of something (e.g. grosz-ek ‘pea’) or the collectivity of items (e.g. pierz-e ‘feathers; plumage’). Similarly, specific morphemes accentuate the singularity of an event (e.g. kaszl-ną-ć ‘to cough once’) or the multitude (multiplication) of actions (e.g. na-obierać ‘peel a lot of’, po-wynosić ‘take out many/all’ the items). The importance of the concept of number in Polish is also attested by the existence of numerals. The various degrees of precision that they express, e.g. the so-called definite numerals (trzy ‘three’, piętnaście ‘fifteen’) and indefinite (kilka ‘a few’, dużo ‘many’, tyle ‘that many’) correspond to the differences in the number and needs of the persons engaged in communication. The different inflectional paradigms and related syntactic functions of different numeral types stems from the need to link, in sentences, numbers with names of entities and events – that need, in turn, shows that a wide range of phenomena are perceived and conceptualised in numerical terms.
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It is assumed in the linguistic worldview conception that a language’s grammatical structure can accentuate certain aspects of semantic content and thus contribute to the emergence of a specific, often unique and untranslatable worldview. A grammatical category of this kind is the neuter gender in German: its frequent use stems from the lack of gender endings on verbs, as well as from the fact that diminutives (ending in -chen or -lein) are neuter (hence the surprising neuter gender of das Mädchen). Especially important in this respect is the pronoun es, which not only replaces nouns in neuter but performs many other crucial grammatical functions. It is therefore not accidental that Siegmund Freud chose das Es for his category of ‘childness’ (translated erroneously as id into English and from there into Polish).The productivity and frequency of the use of the neuter gender obviously leaves its trace. In literature, the category serves not only to express ‘childness’ but also neutrality/universality, which is illustrated here with examples from the Grimm brothers’ tales, Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffman’s, and contemporary children’s literature (Paul Maar). Next, it is considered what happens to the neuter in Polish translation and whether the necessary reductions are only due to linguistic untranslatability and the “terror of Polish”, or whether they may point to a subconscious (perhaps even a conscious) rejection of that category and a projection of a dichotomous male/female world.Based on this grammatical phenomenon, it is shown how elements of language are manifested in literature and whether they can act as a cultural barrier in the translation process.
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The study claims that in English there is a grammatical construction, or even a family of constructions, that expresses the notion of a ‘sense of entitlement’. In sentences like Can I have my apple and cheese, please?, this notion is expressed with the pronoun my. In order to describe the meaning of this construction in a way that would be understandable not only to speakers of English but also those whose languages do not contain the word for ‘entitlement’, Natural Semantic Metalanguage is used. NSM, in the intention of its creators, allows for descriptions of languages and cultures with the use of universal and semantically simple concepts, present in all languages as lexemes or similar units.The ‘sense of entitlement’ is expressed when everyday rituals are violated, which disturbs the speaker, e.g. Would you leave me finish my breakfast?. The assumption here is that everyone has the right and wants to perform these regular, ritualistic activities. The range of potential obstacles has not been established at this stage of research but can be captured in the formula “I cannot do now what I always do at this time; this is bad; everybody can know this”.The meaning of a ‘sense of entitlement’ is connected with such words and expressions as have the right to, be entitled to, personal space, privacy, violate/disturb/interfere, which express some of the major assumptions and concerns of contemporary Anglo-culture. Especially interesting is the connection between the ‘sense of entitlement’ and justice because both are grounded in the existence of voluntarily obeyed principles. It appears that the English grammar contains an implicit understanding that everybody has the right to their personal routine that involves having breakfast (my breakfast) or dinner (my dinner) in a particular way, or e.g. reading (my newspaper). It is bad when the routine is disturbed by others.
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The paper introduces a pilot study from ongoing ethnolinguistic research into the Czech concept of VÁNOCE ‘Christmas’. It is placed in the context of the theory of cultural key words referring to the author’s previous studies on the concepts of DOMOV ‘home, homeland’ and POHODA ‘well-being, comfort, rest, peace’. In the paper, the meaning of the concept of VÁNOCE is summarized in accordance with Czech monolingual dictionaries, the rituals and scenarios associated with the Christmas Eve are described using empirical research data, analysed are social discussions of Christmas (esp. of the baby Jesus) as well as examples of the conceptualization of Christmas in popular songs. The paper also includes several remarks on the Christmas stereotype in Czech sign language.
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Cognitive Linguistics, which primarily deals with the conceptual structures of human mind via their language manifestation, opens new prospects in studying binary oppositions. Despite numerous researches of this phenomenon, lots of questions raised here do not have exhaustive answers. What we need is not only inquiry oriented toward ascertainment of the universality (or the degree of universality) of some binary oppositions, but studies of their system in a certain linguaculture within a given time period. The precise study of interrelations among various symbolic domains in this sphere is another important problem. Furthermore, binary oppositions should not be seen as stable and unchangeable structures presented within human consciousness but they must be regarded as the external manifestation of specific cognitive mechanisms.This paper presents an empirical investigation of the binary opposition LIGHT-DARK based on the method of an associative experiment. The analysis of the responses clearly reveals binary oppositions which are deep-rooted in the speakers’ consciousness and which closely interact. These oppositions build a rich background for the metaphorical interchange between corresponding domains which create a whole system where the correlating parts are used for the metaphoric designation of each other. The main focus of this study is the interaction of cognitive mechanisms of contradistinction with conceptual metaphor and further analysis of the result of this process in a language.
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