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In the Soviet totalitarian discourse there are two intertwined types of the axiological scale: universal and ideological valuation. A reliable analysis of a discourse of this kind requires a precise separation of the two types. One of the effective analytical tools may be the concept of the ideologeme. This paper attempts to define it and to present a method of verifying the “ideological” character of communicative acts by pairing them according to the principle of axiological polarity within antagonistic discourses. Instead of treating the ideologeme (or more precisely: an implementation of the ideologeme) as a unit “referring” or “related” to the ideological area, it is worth to consider defining it as a unit distinctive in a given ideology (or political gnosis). Implementations of ideologemes are always marked axiomatically. In conditions of familiar discourse they will always involve positive values, while as parts of an antagonistic discourse, these values will be negative. This assumption may facilitate a move away from intuitive identification of textual implementation of concepts of this type, or, at least, will be useful as a starting point for a procedure verifying the researcher’s intuition. The ideologemic character of a textual unit can be established on the basis of a specially prepared test that juxtaposes two implementations presenting opposite values within ideological oppositional discourses.
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In order to translate the English words home and homeland, as well as to compare their semantics with that of their counterparts in other languages, one must explore complex and culturally conditioned conceptual spheres in the languages involved. Rather than providing ready-made answers, the article attempts to delineate the areas of philological considerations and textual analyses, including corpus research, necessary to achieve this aim. Gaston Bachelard’s “poetics of space”, proposed for French, is compared with the Polish context. Preliminary results of corpus analysis of English, German, French, and Polish are presented. Lublin ethnolinguistics is mentioned as an important player.
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Ethnolingusitics, especially in non-Slavic countries, has been an off-stream scholarly endeavour. However, the appearance of three monographs authored by James Underhill over the period of five years (2007–2012) allows one to hope, if not for a radical change of the status quo, then for new territories to be explored in ethnolinguistic inquiries. Despite similarities to and inspiration from Lublin ethnolinguistics, Underhill’s approach is markedly different, both in the theoretical sense, and in the realm of methodology and analytical practice. The present account is mainly based on the Scottish linguist’s latest book, Ethnolinguistics and Cultural Concepts (2012).
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The article discusses the tenets of comparative semantic research on the names of emotions in the domain of joy. The author follows Renata Grzegorczykowa’s idea of a subjective nature of emotions and their dependence on particular languages and cultures. She then proposes to ground the research not in concepts associated with specific lexical items in a given language (e.g. the English happiness) but in a general conceptual invariant around which lexicosemantic fields of emotions terms are organized. To justify this approach, the author refers to the difficulties in comparing the results of research on different languages as well as the problems involved in translation. It is necessary to distinguish and address various levels of abstraction in understanding lexical concepts of emotions; it is also crucial to analyze their modelling in discourse. Therefore, apart from lexicographic data, which show what is possible, use is made of texts, which contain realizations of these potentialities. A combination of the structural linguistic approach with the cognitive linguistic approach facilitates a fuller understanding of the phenomena being investigated, which is illustrated with a schematic characterization of selected portions of the linguistic view of the Polish radość (joy).
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The article presents the life and work of Vladimir Toporov (1928--2005), one of the most distinguished Russian scholars of the 20th century, a philologist, linguist, literary analyst, folklorist, a student of Indo-European and Slavic ancient heritage, mythology and religion, a semiotician, theorist of culture, philosopher, the author of fundamental works in Baltic studies (among others, a five-volume dictionary of Prussian), Indian and Balkan studies or classic philology. Born in Moscow, Toporov worked all his life at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Academy of Sciences, together with other distinguished scholars, such as Vyacheslav Ivanov, Nikita Tolstoy, Oleg Trubachev, Vladimir Dybo or Andrey Zaliznyak. The names of Toporov and Ivanov are associated with the development of structuralism in Slavic studies and the emergence of the famous Moscow-Tartu semiotic school. In their work they proposed a reconstruction of the proto-Slavic mythological text, the so called “basic myth”, about a struggle of the “master of thunder” with chthonian creatures. The author indicates and analyzes key concepts, such as time, place, thing, act, thought, word, number, name, sanctity, fate, which unite the whole rich legacy of the scholar into a single “hypertext”. A special meaning was given by Toporov to the conception of text. He extended it beyond the narrow philological (verbal) meaning and associated it with a specially organized semantic sequence of signs of a different kind: sounds, gestures, colours, pictures etc. Text, whose constitutive feature Toporov identified to be SENSE, became the major object of structuralsemiotic research on culture.
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The author presents the linguistic-cultural picture of the relationship US / THEM (OWN / FOREIGN) on the basis of the accounts of elderly country inhabitants of the Lublin region. The material was collected between 1995 and 2005. The stereotype of someone from outside (one of THEM), entrenched in the consciousness of the subjects, is captured in several aspects: territorial, national, religious, cultural, psychological, in terms of lifestyle and appearance. The multitude of the criteria makes foreignness gradable. One of THEM is above all a Jew, because of the religion, occupation (trade), behaviour, clothes and appearance. At the same time, however, a Jew is close in the territorial sense, is one of US. A German is also foreign, with memories of WWII as a cruel person who hates Poles, who speaks an unintelligible language but is impressively clean and rich. The least foreign is a Russian or Ukrainian, a “brother-Slav”, sometimes treated even as one of US. The author also claims that the US / THEM contrast also has a purely linguistic nature manifested in the oppositions known / unknown, contemporary / old, and even standard Polish / folk dialectal Polish. Foreign is the thing unknown and distant, what belongs to the past (from the point of view of the younger generation) or to the present (for the older generation). Therefore the category of foreignness is not only gradable but also ambivalently valuated.
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In the theory of stereotypes, the “us-them” opposition is usually associated with inter-ethnic relations, but the conception of foreignness may also appear within a single ethnic group. The peasant-dialectal collective noun Polactwo ‘Polishness’ was in the 1930’s popularized by Edmund Osmańczyk as the name of a “community fighting for a single cause”. Several decades later, through a book by Rafał Ziemkiewicz, the same word gained currency as a contemptuous term for a passive, distrustful, backward portion of the Polish post-socialist society. The word thus became an example of enantosemy: a semanticfunctional split of one and the same word into two opposite lexicalsemantic and axiological variants. The analysis of other words derived from Polska ‘Poland’, Polak ‘Pole’ (polskość, polackość ‘Polishness’, polskojęzyczny ‘Polish-speaking’) shows that the enantosemy seems to infiltrate the whole contemporary Polish discourse, revealing deep divisions in the identity of Poles.
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The article discusses the ways in which subcultures are strengthened by the category US - THEM and the means of manifesting that category conditioned by the type of subculture and the degree of its social openness. The presence or the active creation of THEM enables one to form the image of one’s own group and the conviction of its superiority, which becomes the basis for an unwritten code of behaviour of its members. The observation is concerned with the language of contemporary subcultures, for it is there that the attitude of the group towards the world is most fully revealed, it is there that social and group conceptions, values, principles and norms have been entrenched. The analysis is concerned with subcultures of different degrees of social bond: from the open hip-hop, through the spontaneous communitas of football fans to the closed subculture of prison, where social order is based on ritualized verbal formulae.
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On the basis of the rich literature of the subject and observations of the Polish phraseology, the author discusses the relationships between the code and gesture in linguistic communication. The article attempts to show in what way gestures and their verbal phraseological counterparts become metaphors and eventually idioms. The following cases are discussed: 1) gestures rooted in biological reactions of the organism are universal and contribute to verbal communication as simple information about emotions (frowning and squinting as a sign of anger); 2) gestures are biologically conditioned but interpreted in culture (turning one’s back on someone may be taken as a refusal to help); 3) gestures are purely symbolic, physically impossible, and their verbal aspect is metaphorical, idiomatic (ugryźć się w język ‘bite one’s tongue’, łamać sobie głowę ‘rack one’s brain’, lit. ‘break one’s head’, zrywać boki ‘laugh heartily’, lit. ‘tear off one’s sides’). A special case are phraseological units and idioms borrowed from another language or culture: they are semantically modified and their paraphrases become fixed (e.g. pokazać komuś figę ‘refuse to do something’, lit. ‘show someone a fig’).
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The Author of the article is taking over the meaning of the words талерантнасць (eng. tolerance), памяркоўнасць (eng. reasonableness), цярплівасць (eng. patience), which are used for the description of the term tolerance in Belarusian language. The Author is looking after its appearance at the Belarusian language dictionaries, analyzing its etymology, comparing synonyms, antonyms and hyperonyms. At the same time the Author specifies the time range of specific changes of the form and content. It is necessary to pay attention to the question concerning to the subject of tolerance from a concrete person whose characteristic features are: the acceptance of other people, kindness, understanding, appreciation and respect towards other people, social groups (especially religious and national), up to the characteristics of abstract conceptions, ideas. On the other hand I should admit the absence at the vocabulary database of the content ‘understanding and respect for the different sexual orientation groups’, which begins to appear just at modern texts at the tern of the XX and the XXI century (so text researches as analyses of the questionnaires which will be carried out among Belarusian youth will be done by the Author in the nearest feature). At the Belarusian language dictionaries nation is minimally characterized by the concept tolerance (refers to the joint subject). At the article the Author has used the methodology of cognitive definition, proposed by Jerzy Bartminski.
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This article describes the linguistic-cultural and associative field of the universal concept of arché (fire and water) in the Polish and Russian languages and identifies its general and specific cognitive symptoms in a variety of conceptual spheres. The author performs an analysis of the Polish and Russian associative dictionary that forms the so-called core of language consciousness.
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