Edited by: Adam Głaz, David S. Danaher, Przemysław Łozowski

The Linguistic Worldview Ethnolinguistics, Cognition, and Culture Versita Discipline: Language, Literature

Managing Editor: Anna Borowska

Language Editor: David S. Danaher Published by Versita, Versita Ltd, 78 York Street, London W1H 1DP, Great Britain.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivs 3.0 license, which means that the text may be used for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author.

Copyright © 2013 Wojciech Chlebda (chapter 1); Anna Pajdzińska (chapter 2); Agnieszka Gicala (chapter 3); Irena Vaňková (chapter 4); David S. Danaher (chapter 5, introduction); José Vergara (chapter 6); Anna Wierzbicka (chapter 7); Jerzy Bartmiński (chapter 8); Katarzyna Prorok (chapter 9); Stanisława Niebrzegowska- Bartmińska (chapter 10); Agata Bielak (chapter 11); Marta Nowosad-Bakalarczyk (chapter 12); Dorota Piekarczyk (chapter 13); Dorota Filar (chapter 14); Aneta Wysocka (chapter 15); Małgorzata Brzozowska (chapter 16); Elżbieta Tabakowska (chapter 17); James W. Underhill (chapter 18); Przemysław Łozowski (chapter 19, introduction); Adam Głaz (chapter 20, introduction); Agnieszka Mierzwińska- Hajnos (chapter 21); Enrique Bernárdez (chapter 22); Anna Niderla (chapter 23); Wiktoria Kudela-Świątek (chapter 24)

ISBN (paperback): 978-83-7656-072-4

ISBN (hardcover): 978-83-7656-073-1

ISBN (for electronic copy): 978-83-7656-074-8

Managing Editor: Anna Borowska

Language Editor: David S. Danaher

Cover illustration: © istock.com/alexsl www.versita.com

Contents

Acknowledgments...... 9

Introduction Adam Głaz, David S. Danaher, and Przemysław Łozowski...... 11

Chapter 1 Wojciech Chlebda Can Polish Ethnolinguistics Become a Philological Keystone of the Humanities?...... 25

Part I. THE LINGUISTIC WORLDVIEW AND THE POETIC TEXT

Chapter 2 Anna Pajdzińska The Linguistic Worldview and Literature...... 41

Chapter 3 Agnieszka Gicala The Linguistic Worldview and conceptual disintegration: Wisława Szymborska’s poem Identyfikacja and its English translation by Clare Cavanagh...... 61

Chapter 4 Irena Vaňková What words tell us: phenomenology, cognitive ethnolinguistics, and poetry...77

Chapter 5 David S. Danaher Ethnolinguistics and literature: the meaning of svědomí ‘conscience’ in the writings of Václav Havel...... 93 Chapter 6 José Vergara Cognitive play in Daniil Kharms’ “Blue Notebook №10”...... 115

Part II. THE COGNITIVE DEFINITION

Chapter 7 Anna Wierzbicka Polish zwierzęta ‘animals’ and jabłka ‘apples’: an ethnosemantic inquiry...... 137

Chapter 8 Jerzy Bartmiński The cognitive definition as a text of culture...... 161

Chapter 9 Katarzyna Prorok and Adam Głaz The cognitive definition of iron (żelazo) in Polish folk tradition...... 181

Chapter 10 Stanisława Niebrzegowska-Bartmińska Stereotypes and values in the linguistic worldview...... 199

Chapter 11 Agata Bielak The linguistic and cultural view of Saint Agatha in Polish folk tradition...... 215

Part III. THE SYSTEM AND BEYOND

Chapter 12 Marta Nowosad-Bakalarczyk Linguistic categories in onomasiological perspective. The category of quantity in contemporary Polish...... 227

Chapter 13 Dorota Piekarczyk The Polish linguistic view of oral and written text...... 245

Chapter 14 Dorota Filar “Who is doing the thinking?” The concept of the THINKING SUBJECT in Polish...... 263 Chapter 15 Aneta Wysocka The concept of NIEWOLNIK ‘slave’ in Polish: an ethnolinguistic panchronic reconnaissance...... 283

Chapter 16 Małgorzata Brzozowska The linguistic view of patriotism in selected Polish Political Commentaries..301

Part IV. PROBLEMS AND QUESTIONS

Chapter 17 Elżbieta Tabakowska A linguistic Picture, Image, or view of “Polish Cognitive Studies”...... 321

Chapter 18 James W. Underhill Reflections upon Bartmiński’s ethnolinguistic approach to language and culture...... 339

Chapter 19 Przemysław Łozowski Language vis-à-vis culture in Jerzy Bartmiński’s cognitive ethnolinguistics....351

Chapter 20 Adam Głaz Viewpoint and cognitive distance...... 371

Chapter 21 Agnieszka Mierzwińska-Hajnos Jerzy Bartmiński’s Linguistic Worldview Meets the Western Cognitive Tradition: the semantics of Polish and English plant names...... 287

Part V. EXTENSIONS AND INSPIRATIONS

Chapter 22 Enrique Bernárdez Evidentiality and the epistemic use of the Icelandic verbs sjá and heyra. A cultural Linguistic View...... 415 Chapter 23 Anna Niderla Self-presentation of the Speaking Subject. Selected Interviews With Ex- Chancellors of the Marie Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin...... 443

Chapter 24 Wiktoria Kudela-Świątek Linguistic views of enslavement in Biographical Narratives of Poles in Kazakhstan...... 459

Name Index...... 475 Subject Index...... 483 Edited by: Adam Głaz, David S. Danaher, Przemysław Łozowski

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all the contributors to the volume for their cooperation and patience, but above all for their willingness to share their work with us and with the scholarly community at large.

The Editors

Acknowledgments 9 The Linguistic Worldview Ethnolinguistics, Cognition, and Culture

1 0 Edited by: Adam Głaz, David S. Danaher, Przemysław Łozowski

Introduction

Adam Głaz, David S. Danaher, and Przemysław Łozowski

1. The Linguistic Worldview: a Brief Historical Survey

Western philosophy1 has been addressing the question of how language relates to the world at least since the Ancient Greek debate between those who thought that the relationship is natural (cf. Plato’s Cratylus) and those who thought it is subjective and conventional (Democritus of Abdera, and in a way also Aristotle2). In the Middle Ages, realists (e.g. Duns Scotus) claimed that words denote concepts that correspond to real entities, whereas nominalists (e.g. William of Ockham) maintained that concepts only correspond to names or words (nomina). These considerations assumed a more specific shape with the growing awareness of the sometimes unbridgeable differences between languages, an idea expressed in Martin Luther’s Sendbrief vom Dollmetschen (1530) or John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding (1690). Clear traces of the linguistic worldview3 idea can be found in Francis Bacon’s De Dignitate et

1 The brief outline in this section is largely based on Pajdzińska (this volume) and Żuk (2010). 2 Although this is what he suggests in Chapter 2 of De Interpretatione, Aristotle in fact introduced a third element, thinking, into the equation, in which he prefigured many later ideas including those in contemporary linguistics. 3 By using this spelling variant, rather than world-view or world view, we follow Bartmiński (2009/2012) in order to underscore the integrity of a speech community’s mental image of the world conditioned by linguistic and extralinguistic (experiential, cognitive, cultural) factors. For a discussion of other related terms, such as the linguistic image/picture of the world see Tabakowska and Łozowski (both in this volume).

Introduction 1 1 The Linguistic Worldview Ethnolinguistics, Cognition, and Culture

Augmentis Scientiarum (1623): the philosopher claimed that the unique structure and certain idiosyncratic properties of languages provide access to what the communities using these languages feel and think. The progressive interest in psychological and sociological aspects of language was continued by the 18th-c. German thinkers Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Johann Georg Hamann and Johann Gottfried Herder. Hamann and Herder saw a connection between language and the spirit (psyche) of the community or nation that speaks it. These observations were soon afterwards developed by Wilhelm von Humboldt, who is usually credited with originating the idea of the linguistic worldview. Humboldt says:

It is no empty play upon words if we speak of language as arising in autonomy solely from itself and divinely free, but of languages as bound and dependent on the nations to which they belong. (Humboldt, 1999 [1836], p. 24)

Thus, “there resides in every language a characteristic world-view [Weltansicht]”4 (ibid., p. 60). However, Humboldt attributes to speakers the ability to overcome the limitations imposed by each language, to extend the worldview in creative speech events. Humboldt’s views were continued and elaborated by Leo Weisgerber and Neo-Humboldtians with their notion of sprachliches Weltbild. Their main idea was that every language, a particular community’s mother tongue, is a repository of cognitive content. Reality, claimed Neo-Humboldtians, is segmented not according to the properties of things themselves but to the lexical structure and syntactic organization of the mother tongue. Similar ideas were developed by three generations of American anthropologists and anthropological linguists, from Franz Boas, through Edward Sapir, to Benjamin Lee Whorf. If, however, Neo-Humboldtian views in the Germany of the 1930s acquired a national-socialist orientation,5 Boas devoted much effort to showing that the notion of a “primitive” language is fundamentally flawed and – in the manner of Humboldt – that speakers can move beyond the limitations of

4 The difference between and the confusion of Weltansicht with Weltanschauung is discussed by Underhill (2009 and 2011). Says Underhill: “Weltansicht ... is the patterning of conceptual frameworks and the organisation of ideas which makes up the form of language (in Humboldt’s definition of form), the patterning within which we think... Weltanschauung ... is the intellectual refinement and elaboration of those fundamental conceptual frameworks which enable us to give form to various mindsets or ideologies” (2009, p. 106). And elsewhere: “In Humboldt’s terms, the worldview (Weltansicht) we inherit as we assimilate the language system contributes to the shaping of our own worldview (Weltanschauung)” (2011, p. 83). 5 Cf. Bock (1992, p. 249) or Leavitt (2006, p. 69).

1 2 Introduction Edited by: Adam Głaz, David S. Danaher, Przemysław Łozowski

their mother tongue should they be confronted with the need to do so. Similarly, although Sapir talks about a “tyrannical hold that linguistic form has upon our orientation to the world” (1931, p. 578), it is a hold imposed by tradition and usage, not by the language system. “The tyranny of language is then a human tyranny and not that of an impersonal structure” so “it is for this very reason that that tyranny of usage can be resisted” (Underhill 2009: 29). Sapir was a poetry-lover and a poet himself, drawn to it “probably [because of] the fact that poets rework language and explore the boundaries of usage, reinventing expressions and pushing against the limits of common usage” (Underhill, 2009, p. 26). Finally, Whorf seems to have formulated the most radical version of the linguistic relativity principle in that the terms of the agreement “that holds throughout our speech community” and that is “codified in the patterns of our language” are “absolutely obligatory” (Whorf, 1956 [1940], pp.213-214).6 The progressively more radical outlook on a language’s hold on the speaker is expressed by James Underhill thusly: “where Boas speaks of channels and Sapir speaks of grooves, Whorf sees ruts”7 (Underhill, 2009, p. 35). However, as evidenced by the subsequent debates and the variety of interpretations of these scholars’ writings,8 their respective positions on the language-worldview interface are neither unequivocal nor in fact reducible to a single quote. Later approaches to language and worldview, between approximately 1950 and the mid-1980s, are succinctly summarized in Bock (1992), with five major paths of development. First, there was the transformational movement of the 1950s that emphasized the universal in the world’s languages, seeing the differences between them as largely superficial and the whole question of the linguistic worldview as unworthy of serious consideration. Then, in the

6 Cf. in this spirit the following observation from Clyde Kluckhorn: “[The Navajo language] delights in sharply defined categories. It likes, so to speak, to file things away in neat little packages. It favors always the concrete and particular, with little scope for abstractions. [...] Navajo focuses interest upon doing – upon verbs as opposed to nouns or adjectives. [...] [S] triking divergences in manner of thinking are crystallized in and perpetuated by the forms of Navajo grammar” (in Bock, 1981, p. 39, after Bock, 1992, p. 249). 7 “The form of our grammar compels us to select a few traits of thought we wish to express and suppresses many other aspects which the speaker has in mind and which the hearer supplies according to his fancy ... There is little doubt that thought is thus directed in various channels...” (Boas, 1942, quoted in Lucy, 1992, p. 15) “Language and our thought-grooves are inextricably interwoven, are, in a sense, one and the same.” (Sapir, 1921, p. 232) “...the best approach is through an exotic language, for in its study we are at long last pushed willy-nilly out of our ruts.” (Whorf, 1956 [1941], p. 138; in all quotes, the emphasis is ours, A.G., D.D., and P.Ł.) 8 An article-length discussion of Boas, Sapir, Whorf and worldview, with many useful references, is Hill and Mannheim (1992).

Introduction 1 3 The Linguistic Worldview Ethnolinguistics, Cognition, and Culture

1960s, came recognition of the fact that bilingual speakers (also in unrelated languages) can calibrate the apparently irreconcilable outlooks on the world that these languages bring with them. Next, interest in cognitive psychology and the poetic aspects of language in the 1970s and 1980s brought to linguists’ attention “topics similar to world view” (Bock, 1992, p. 250), such as metaphor, conventionalized symbolization of conceptual content, or the imagination of the individual. Finally, over this whole period, ideas were being contributed by research on discourse analysis (worldview being arrived at through dialog, in various understandings of the term) and on literacy (with the social or economic changes it brings or the effect it has on people’s psychology). While not all of these issues are directly relevant to the linguistic worldview program the present book is concerned with, some of them, such as the dialogic nature of human interaction, cognitive structuring of conceptual content, or the speakers’ poetic imagination, do play a significant role in many of the chapters that follow.9

2. Jerzy Bartmiński’s cognitive Ethnolinguistic Worldview

Although in general terms this book is concerned with the linguistic worldview broadly understood, its specific focus is on one particular variant of the idea, its sources, extensions, and inspirations for related research. Some chapters also propose a critical assessment of the approach. The approach in question is the ethnolinguistic linguistic worldview program pursued in Lublin, Poland, and initiated and headed by Jerzy Bartmiński, i.e. a “subject-oriented interpretation of reality” (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 13), a naive “picture of the world suggested [...] by language” (ibid., p. 6). In order to distinguish it from other related approaches, we will refer to it as LWV (for linguistic worldview). Admittedly, the LWV program extends beyond Bartmiński’s ethnolinguistic studies, both in Poland and elsewhere (in the sense that many scholars contributing to the LWV enterprise are not ethnolinguists or may actually be critical of some of the ideas proposed by Bartmiński and his collaborators),

9 In some approaches (Maćkiewicz, 1999), worldview in the sense of an ideological, political, or religious outlook on the world is superordinate with regard to the linguistic worldview. There are two “modes of existence” of the worldview thus understood: mental (a component of people’s consciousness) and an objectification of this abstract mental construct in the form of “traces”: art, customs, rituals, gestures, mimicry, social organizations, relationships, and language. It is to the linguistic “trace” of what is in people’s minds that this book is devoted.

1 4 Introduction Edited by: Adam Głaz, David S. Danaher, Przemysław Łozowski

and yet it is the “Lublin ethnolinguistic LWV” initiative that functions as the volume’s conceptual axis.10 Bartmiński defines the linguistic worldview as

a language-entrenched interpretation of reality, which can be expressed in the form of judgements about the world, people, things, events. It is an interpretation, not a reflection; it is a portrait without claims to fidelity, not a photograph of real object. The interpretation is a result of subjective perception and conceptualization of reality performed by the speakers of a given language; thus, it is clearly subjective and anthropocentric but also intersubjective (social). It unites people in a given social environment, creates a community of thoughts, feelings and values. It influences (to what extent is a matter for discussion) the perception and understanding of the social situation by a member of the community. (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 23)

In his introduction to the first issue of the journalEtnolingwistyka (Bartmiński, 1988b), the author proposes that the notion of the linguistic worldview, the “naive” picture at the very basis of language, be treated as the key object of ethnolinguistic research. Lublin ethnolinguistics, whose prime achievement is the “Dictionary of Folk Stereotypes and Symbols” (SSSL, 1996-2012), the reconstruction of the linguistic worldview of rural speakers of Polish, draws inspiration from two major sources: Russian historical ethnolinguistics practiced by Nikita I. Tolstoy or Vyacheslav V. Ivanov and Vladimir N. Toporov, and American synchronic ethnolinguistics of Sapir and Whorf (see above). Other sources of inspiration include the work of Bronislaw Malinowski or Anna Wierzbicka. However, the term ethnolinguistics has a broad application and extends far beyond the realm of folklore: it embraces the study of any ethnic language, dialect, or language variety, from rural folk dialects, through urban dialects, student jargons, to national languages, etc. Indeed, as a methodology it

10 According to Żuk (2010), the ideas of Polish scholars that later developed into the LWV can be traced back to 1930s. For example, Ajdukiewicz (1934) noted a dependence of one’s scientific worldview on the conceptual apparatus used for the explication of experience. Szober (1939), in turn, discussed the picture of a human being projected by Polish phraseology. However, the first explicit definition of the linguistic worldview in Polish linguistic literature came from Walery Pisarek four decades later: it is “the picture/ view of the world reflected in a given national language” (Pisarek, 1978, p. 143; translation ours, A.G., D.D., and P.Ł.). As we will see, in Bartmiński’s approach, the view is not reflected, need not be inherent in a national language, and does not really relate to the world (in the sense of physical reality).

Introduction 1 5 The Linguistic Worldview Ethnolinguistics, Cognition, and Culture

may have a universal appeal, cf. the many diverse contributions to the present volume.11 The name of Anna Wierzbicka is especially important in the context of the so- called “cognitive definition” of the “mental object” associated with a given entity, of the way it is viewed, categorized, evaluated, and talked about by speakers of a given language (see Bartmiński, 1988a).12 On the one hand, the preliminary installment of SSSL (Bartmiński, 1980) arose independently of Wierzbicka’s theory of semantic primitives as a continuation of the work on folklore inspired by the linguist Maria Renata Mayenowa. However, in his major article on the cognitive definition, Bartmiński (1988a) already refers to Wierzbicka’s Lexicography and Conceptual Analysis (1985). This, in the words of the former author (p.c.), is Wierzbicka’s most interesting work, with an introduction that contains an excellent account of a comprehensive semantic description that is also pursued by the Lublin-based ethnolinguists. It therefore seemed justifiable to include Anna Wierzbicka’s chapter at the beginning of the section on the cognitive definition in this volume: her explications have conceptually fueled the pursuits of Bartmiński and his collaborators and while the two approaches arose independently, they follow the same general path.

3. Controversies surrounding the LWV

Over more than three decades of its existence, the Lublin ethnolinguistic worldview program has been beset by a number of questions and controversies, the most important of which are listed here, together with explications of the relevant views of Jerzy Bartmiński and his co-workers.

1. Are we pursuing a mental or a linguistic picture? On the one hand, the entity being described is mental (a “mental object”), and on the other, the ultimate description is that of a “linguistic worldview.” In Bartmiński’s view, the picture of a mental object includes a linguistic picture: his approach is integrationist, not separatist (in the sense of Harris, 1990), i.e. he considers language signs not in isolation from but in relation to other forms of behavior (culture) or to cognition. It is therefore a cognitive ethnolinguistic approach.

11 Or James Underhill’s recent book Ethnolinguistics and Cultural Concepts (2012), concerned with contemporary journalistic discourse. 12 For a fuller account and exemplification, see Bartmiński (2009/2012) as well chapters in this volume by Bartmiński, Niebrzegowska-Bartmińska, and Prorok & Głaz.

1 6 Introduction Edited by: Adam Głaz, David S. Danaher, Przemysław Łozowski

2. Is the LWV program a pursuit of a linguistic or a textual picture? Again, Bartmiński sees no reason to isolate a distinct textual worldview or even a textual component of the LWV because

“linguistic” subsumes both what is systemic and what is conventionalized (though not necessarily systemic in the structuralist understanding), as well as what is contained in specific texts that contain more or less predictable, individual concretizations of the system and norm, and even their violations or modifications – but always capitalize on both the system and the convention of social norms. (Bartmiński, 2001b, p. 32; translation ours)

The view is exemplified in several chapters in this volume.

3. Are we dealing with a linguistic or a cultural picture? Since the cultural component in the ethnolinguistic worldview program is so conspicuous, is the endeavor not a pursuit of what Anusiewicz, Dąbrowska, and Fleischer (2000) call the cultural worldview (CWV)? No, it is not, it is a linguistic-cultural worldview (LCWV): if for Anusiewicz et al. CWV is a broader notion that subsumes LWV and that includes mimicry, gestures, and various aspects of the global worldview (scientific, ideological, religious, economic, etc. – cf. Żuk, 2010), then for Bartmiński language and culture are linked through a “paradox of reciprocal dependence” (2001a, p. 17).

4. Is the LWV a reflection, interpretation, or creation of reality? It is mainly interpretation (cf. the quotes above)13 but also to some extent a creation: for instance, in the case of fairy tales, legends, and other fiction that nevertheless draws for its credibility on what is non-fictional.

5. What database should constitute the foundation for the reconstruction of the LWV, that is, where is the LWV “hidden”? Is it to be found in the language system alone (as once claimed by Grzegorczykowa, 1990) or in the system plus something else? If so, what else? Bartmiński makes use of four kinds of data: the language system, texts (stereotyped14 but also creative, poetic, one-off texts), and questionnaires. The fourth kind are the so-called “co-

13 According to Maćkiewicz (1999, p. 12), interpretation here consists in segmentation, description, arrangement, and valuation. 14 Stereotyped texts are texts that are “reproduced many times and [are] in effect socially established, with the status of linguistic ‘plates’ or ‘matrices’” (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 17), such as proverbs, anecdotes, fables, tales, etc.

Introduction 1 7 The Linguistic Worldview Ethnolinguistics, Cognition, and Culture

linguistic” data,15 i.e. “conventionalized patterns of behavior” (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 34), customs, social practices often with the use of artifacts, and these may or may not be accompanied by language (i.e. the practice of putting iron on one’s feet to make them hard – this corroborates iron’s hardness, its basic property entrenched in the Polish word żelazo16). This volume has the ambition to show that this kind of wide-ranging approach is fruitful and well-designed, with some chapters focusing on the system (e.g. Nowosad-Bakalarczyk or Piekarczyk), some others on the system-cum-text (e.g. Filar, Wysocka) or text-vs.-system (e.g. Pajdzińska, Vaňková, Danaher), yet others on texts to a greater extent than on the system (Gicala, Vergara). Some make use of questionnaires (Brzozowska) and some also include co- linguistic data (Prorok & Głaz or Bielak).

4. This volume

A more systematic, albeit a brief overview of the volume’s content is now in order. In its basic design, it emerged from the theme of the conference held in Lublin, Poland, in October 2011: “The linguistic worldview or linguistic views of worlds?” If the latter is the case, then what worlds? Is it a case of one language/one worldview? Are there literary or poetic worldviews? Are there auctorial worldviews? Many of the chapters here are based on presentations from that conference, and others have been solicited especially for the volume. Generally, four kinds of contributions can be distinguished: (i) a presentation and exemplification of the “Lublin style” LWV approach; (ii) studies inspired by this approach but not following it in detail; (iii) independent but related and compatible research; and (iv) a critical reappraisal of some specific ideas proposed by Bartmiński and his collaborators. The volume begins with Wojciech Chlebda’s synthetic overview of the position of the Lublin Ethnolinguistic School within the larger domain of the Polish humanities: the author considers the possibility that it may play a uniting

15 In Bartmiński (2009/2012) these are called ad-linguistic data (Pol. dane przyjęzykowe). While this term appeared sensible at the time when the book was being translated (by the first editor of the present volume), the term co-linguistic, suggested by Elżbieta Tabakowska at the Globe 2013 conference in Warsaw, Poland, in May 2013, seems much more appropriate. We are grateful to Prof. Tabakowska for this invaluable suggestion and have decided to change the terminology before it becomes too deeply entrenched in the literature. 16 See Prorok & Głaz (this volume) or Głaz & Prorok (forthcoming) for details. Incidentally, the etymology of the English iron shows similar traces: it comes from Old-English isærn ‘holy metal’ or ‘strong metal,’ from Proto-Indo-European *is-(e)ro- ‘powerful.’

1 8 Introduction Edited by: Adam Głaz, David S. Danaher, Przemysław Łozowski

role in that domain. The contributions in Part I, “The LWV and the Poetic Text,” deal with the linguistic worldview broadly understood. This part starts with Anna Pajdzińska’s useful historical survey of the linguistic worldview idea, followed by analyses of selected fragments of Wisława Szymborska’s poetry. The next chapter, by Angieszka Gicala, also takes Szymborska’s poetry as material for analysis. The next two chapters deal with Czech. Irena Vaňková is also concerned with poetry but additionally offers a theoretical discussion of the relationship between language, thinking, and reality. David Danaher investigates the Czech concept of svědomí ‘conscience’ in the writings of Václav Havel. The section is closed by José Vergara’s attempt to come to grips with the elusive cognitive and linguistic play in the works of the Russian experimental writer Daniil Kharms. Part II is thematically much narrower and presents insights into one specific but key construct used by Lublin-based ethnolinguists, namely the cognitive definition (CD). The first chapter in this part, as has already been said, is Anna Wierzbicka’s culture-and-language analysis couched within her theory of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage – a kind of cognitive definition that differs in details but is compatible in its major assumptions with Jerzy Bartmiński’s proposal. Next comes Bartmiński’s argument for treating the CD as text, and specifically as a text of culture. An exemplification of the “CD in action” follows, in a chapter by Katarzyna Prorok and Adam Głaz. Another exemplification is the contribution from Stanisława Niebrzegowska-Bartmińska, who also addresses the relationship between stereotypes and values, with a view to their respective positions in the LWV program. Finally, Agata Bielak reconstructs the Polish folk linguistic view of Saint Agatha, with special emphasis on co-linguistic data. Part III contains five contributions that analyze specific grammatical categories or concepts. Marta Nowosad-Bakalarczyk and Dorota Piekarczyk do it solely on the basis of system data: the former author deals with the category of quantity, the latter with the Polish linguistic portraits of oral and written text. Dorota Filar (the concept of the THINKING SUBJECT) and Aneta Wysocka (the concept of NIEWOLNIK ‘slave’) start with the language system but move on to texts. Finally, in her reconstruction of the Polish linguistic view of patriotism, Małgorzata Brzozowska also makes use of questionnaires. Part IV is a “problems” part: in it, the contributors cast doubts, ask questions, and occasionally propose modifications to Jerzy Bartmiński’s research paradigm. First, Elżbieta Tabakowska surveys the implications behind the term linguistic worldview in comparison with other, related terms proposed in the literature. She also compares Polish cognitive studies with Western cognitive linguistics. James Underhill offers an outsider’s view on Bartmiński’s research, identifying its strengths but also challenging some of its tenets. Next, Przemysław Łozowski investigates the relationship between language and culture in Bartmiński’s work, while Adam Głaz proposes that the parameters of SEEING identified by Bartmiński be supplemented with a more precise specification of the notion

Introduction 1 9 The Linguistic Worldview Ethnolinguistics, Cognition, and Culture

of cognitive distance. Finally, Agnieszka Mierzwińska-Hajnos juxtaposes Bartmiński’s ethnolinguistic analysis of plant names with Langacker’s notion of a domain matrix. The final section of the book, Part V, contains three studies that find support in or have been inspired by Bartmiński’s linguistic worldview approach to various degrees. Enrique Bernárdez offers a cultural and linguistic dictionary- and corpus-based analysis of the Icelandic verbs sjá ‘see’ and heyra ‘hear.’ Finally, the chapters by Anna Niderla and Wiktoria Kudela-Świątek follow the methodology of oral-history research: the former author reconstructs self-presentational images of university ex-chancellors while the latter investigates the linguistic views of enslavement in accounts of Kazakhstani Poles.

5. Envoi

The linguistic worldview idea has been more extensively and thoroughly discussed in the linguistic literature than we have been able to suggest in this brief introduction. The LWV/LCWV research program is also more complex and diverse than the present volume can possibly hope to make clear. However, as its editors we have tried to achieve three major aims. In the first place, we hope to show that Jerzy Bartmiński’s cognitive ethnolinguistic research deserves wide international recognition. Although primarily concerned with Polish data, the methodology and scholarly “philosophy” of the Lublin Ethnolinguistic School ought to have both broader application and broader influence than has so far been the case. An English-language volume devoted to Bartmiński’s program will, it is hoped, facilitate its reception among scholars who are not yet familiar with the Polish linguistic scene. Secondly, we have tried to demonstrate the influence that Bartmiński’s program has had by soliciting contributions from scholars who are familiar with Polish (Lublin) ethnolinguistics but who demonstrate originality in their own linguistic inquiries. Finally, the volume invites the reader to assess Bartmiński and others’ LCWV program critically, to subject its theoretical assumptions and methodological solutions to revision, and perhaps to propose alternative solutions of their own to the specific questions raised here. Whether and to what extent these aims have actually been achieved, we leave to the reader to judge.

Adam Głaz and Przemysław Łozowski, Lublin, Poland David S. Danaher, Madison, WI, USA

February 25, 2013

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References

Ajdukiewicz, Kazimierz. (1934). Das Weltbild und Begriffsapparatur. Erkenntnis, IV, 259-287.

Anusiewicz, Janusz, Dąbrowska, Anna, & Fleischer, Michael. (2000). Językowy obraz świata i kultura. In Język a Kultura 13 (Ed. Anna Dąbrowska and Janusz Anusiewicz) (pp. 11-44). Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego.

Bacon, Francis. (1623). De Dignitiate et Augmentis Scientiarum. Londini: In officina Ioannis Haviland.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (Ed.). (1980). Słownik ludowych stereotypów językowych. Zeszyt próbny. Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (1988a). Definicja kognitywna jako narzędzie opisu konotacji. In Jerzy Bartmiński (Ed.), Konotacja (pp. 169-183). Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (1988b). Słowo wstępne. Etnolingwistyka, 1, 5-7.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (2001a). Język w kontekście kultury. In Jerzy Bartmiński (Ed.), Współczesny język polski (pp. 13-22). Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (2001b). O językowym obrazie świata Polaków końca XX wieku. In Stanisław Dubisz & Stanisław Gajda (Eds.), Polszczyzna XX wieku. Ewolucja i perspektywy rozwoju (pp. 27-53). Warszawa: Dom Wydawniczy ELIPSA.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (2009/2012). Aspects of Cognitive Ethnolinguistics. Ed. by Jörg Zinken. Sheffield and Oakville, CT: Equinox.

Boas, Franz. (1942). Language and culture. In Studies in the History of Culture: The Disciplines of the Humanities (pp. 178-184). American Council of Learned

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Societies. Conference of the Secretaries of Constituent Societies, Waldo Gifford Leland. Published for The Conference by the George Banta Pub. Co.

Bock, Philip K. (Ed.). (1981). Culture Shock: A Reader in Modern Cultural Anthropology. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America.

Bock, Philip K. (1992). World view and language. In International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, Ed.-in-chief William Bright, Vol. 4 (pp. 248-251). New York-Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Głaz, Adam, & Prorok, Katarzyna. (forthcoming). Of triangles, trapeziums and ethnolinguists: the linguistic worldview revisited. In Marek Kuźniak, Michał Szawerna, & Agnieszka Libura (Eds.). [Title pending.] Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.

Grzegorczykowa, (Renata). 1990. Pojęcie językowego obrazu świata. In Jerzy Bartmiński (Ed.), Językowy obraz świata (pp. 41-49). Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Harris, Roy. (1990). The integrationist critique of orthodox linguistics. In Michael P. Jordan (Ed.), The Sixteenth LACUS Forum 1989 (pp. 63-77). Lake Bluff, IL: LACUS.

Hill, Jane H., & Mannheim, Bruce. (1992). Language and world view. Annual Review of Anthropology, 21, 381-406.

Humboldt, Wilhelm von. (1999 [1836]). On Language: On the Diversity of Human Language Construction and its Influence on the Mental Development of the Human Species. Trans. Peter Heath. Ed. Michael Losonsky. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Leavitt, John. (2006). Linguistic relativities. In Christine Jourdan & Kevin Tuite (Eds.), Language, Culture, and Society: Key Topics in Linguistic Anthropology (pp. 47-81). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Locke, John. (1690). An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding. London: The Baffet.

Lucy, John A. (1992). Language Diversity and Thought: A Reformulation of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Luther, Martin. (1530). Sendbrief vom Dollmetschen. [in English: An Open Letter on Translating. Transl. Gary Mann, revised and annotated by Michael D. Marlowe. 2003.] www.bible-researcher.com/luther01.html; accessed Feb 10, 2013

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Maćkiewicz, Jolanta. (1999). Co to jest “językowy obraz świata.” Etnolingwistyka, 11, 7-24.

Pisarek, Walery. (1978). Językowy obraz świata. In Encyklopedia wiedzy o języku polskim, Ed. Stanisław Urbańczyk. Wrocław–Warszawa–Kraków–Gdańsk: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich.

Sapir, Edward. (1921). Language. An Introduction to the Study of Speech. New York: Harcourt, Brace and company.

Sapir, Edward. (1931). Conceptual categories in primitive languages. Science, 74, 578.

SSSL. (1996-2012). Słownik stereotypów i symboli ludowych. Vol. I, nos. 1-4. Ed. Jerzy Bartmiński & Stanisława Niebrzegowska-Bartmińska. Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Szober, Stanisław. (1939). Człowiek współczesny w zwierciadle języka. In Stanisław Szober, Język a człowiek i naród. Szkice o języku (pp. 50-65). Lwów: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Książek Szkolnych.

Underhill, James W. (2009). Humboldt, Worldview and Language. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Underhill, James W. (2011.) Creating Worldviews: Metaphor, Ideology, and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Underhill, James W. (2012). Ethnolinguistics and Cultural Concepts: Truth. Love, Hate and War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Whorf, Benjamin Lee. (1956 [1940]). Science and linguistics. In Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, Ed. John B. Carroll (pp. 207-219). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. [orig. in MIT Technology Review, 42 (6), 227-231, 247-248]

Whorf, Benjamin Lee. (1956 [1941]). The relation of habitual thought and behavior to language. In Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, Ed. John B. Carroll (pp. 134-159). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. [orig. in Language, Culture, and Personality. Essays in Memory of Edward Sapir. Ed. Leslie Spier (pp. 75-93). Menasha, Wis.: Sapir Memorial Publication Fund.]

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Wierzbicka, Anna. (1985). Lexicography and Conceptual Analysis. Ann Arbor: Karoma Publishers Inc.

Żuk, Grzegorz. (2010). Językowy obraz świata w polskiej lingwistyce przełomu wieków. In Małgorzata Karwatowska & Adam Siwiec (Eds.), Przeobrażenia w języku i komunikacji medialnej na przełomie XX i XXI wieku (pp. 239-257). Chełm: Wydawnictwo Drukarnia BEST PRINT.

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Chapter 1 Can Polish ethnolinguistics become a philological keystone of the humanities?

Wojciech Chlebda Opole University, Poland

The question in the title may sound a little provocative. After all, ethnolinguistics is a field of study that signaled its autonomous position in Poland only about thirty years ago and since then has flourished, drawing extensively on the traditions and achievements of other disciplines, such as dialectology, folklore studies, or ethnography. These are all very specialized disciplines, and all use highly specific methodological, conceptual, and terminological apparatuses (dialectology, in particular). According to the Collins English Dictionary (2009), a keystone is “something that is necessary to connect or support a number of other related things,” and it is therefore crucial to determine which characteristics of ethnolinguistics might enable it to play the role of a philological keystone that would unite different disciplines in the humanities. At the start, it is important to emphasize that I use the term ethnolinguistics here only with reference to anthropology, and that I deliberately ignore sociologically-oriented ethnolinguistics. In general terms, while the latter aims to determine the place and functions of language in culture and society, anthropological ethnolinguistics focuses on the opposite vector, namely the cultural heritage of a given national community manifested in the language of this community (i.e. “culture in a language” rather than “a language in culture”). Thus understood, Polish ethnolinguistics has its roots in native ethnography, folklore studies and dialectology as pursued by Bronislaw Malinowski, Kazimierz Moszyński and Kazimierz Nitsch, but also in several distinct trends in European and non-European humanities. It is rooted in the old German tradition of language conceptualization and perception, developed by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Johann Gottfried Herder, and Wilhelm von Humboldt, as well as in the twentieth- century mainstream neohumboldtism, in particular the variety represented by Leo Weisgerber and his naiver Sprachrealismus as the foundation of semantics.1

1 Cf. in this context a discussion of Humboldt’s writings, the notion of worldview and its relation to language in Underhill (2009).

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Polish ethnolinguistics owes much to the cultural linguistics of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf and to later American scholars of the philosophy of language, cognitive psychology and anthropology (Ward Goodenough, Dell Hymes, Eleanor Rosch, Hilary Putnam, Stephen A. Tyler). As can naturally be expected and in addition to the above, there is also the Slavic intense and invigorating flow of ideas between Polish ethnolinguistics and the Russian humanities: semiotics of culture, from Vladimir Propp and Peter Bogatyrev to Yuri Lotman, Vyacheslav Ivanov and Vladimir Toporov, and, in particular, Russian linguistics in its broad spectrum, which is represented by scholars from Yuri Apresyan to Svetlana Tolstaya and Nikita Tolstoy. Finally, there is much overlap between Polish ethnolinguistics and the school of cultural semantics developed by Anna Wierzbicka, first as a representative of the so-called Warsaw School of Semantics (together with, among others, Andrzej Bogusławski, Zofia Zaron, Renata Grzegorczykowa, and Maciej Grochowski), and later, while living and working in Australia, as a creator of original methods of analysis and description of the cultural conditions that underlie concepts and scripts of human behavior. All of these currents converged in one place and one time, and this gave rise to a phenomenon known as the Ethnolinguistic School of Lublin, a school devoted to a cultural, anthropological, and cognitive ethnolinguistics.2 A short history of Polish ethnolinguistics can be divided into three stages, measured in some sense by the contents of the Lublin-based annual Etnolingwistyka, which has been edited by Jerzy Bartmiński since its inception. The origins of ethnolinguistics go back to Bartmiński’s works from the early 1970s (collected in Bartmiński, 1990) that were devoted to the language of folklore texts; Bartmiński analyzed the language of these texts in a wide range of dimensions (from purely statistical to stylistic) and with an unusual understanding of style as an indicator of the point of view and attitude of the speaking subject towards reality. The result is a specific conceptualization of reality, its model. Bartmiński formulated a proposal to reconstruct this model (later called the linguistic worldview) on the basis of three kinds of folklore data: systemic, textual, and the so called “co-linguistic” data,3 such as beliefs, rituals, and customs. The linguistic worldview is

an interpretation of reality, manifested in a language and variously verbalized, which can be subsumed under a set of judgments about the world. These judgments can be “fixed,” i.e. derived from the

2 The label anthropological-cultural ethnolinguistics is used by the Lublin school, while the name cognitive ethnolinguistics has been propagated by Jőrg Zinken (see his introduction to Bartmiński, 2009/2012). See also relevant comments in Kiklewicz & Wilczewski (2011). 3 Ad-linguistic in Bartmiński (2009/2012).

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matter of language, i.e. grammar, vocabulary, clichéd (or stereotyped) texts, e.g. proverbs, or presupposed, i.e. implied by linguistic forms recorded at the level of social knowledge, beliefs, myths, and rituals. (Bartmiński, 2006b, p. 12; cf. also Bartmiński, 2004 [1990])

This concept has become a central and key idea of Polish ethnolinguistics as a whole, and the task of reconstructing the linguistic worldview has become the latter’s engine. In 1980, on the initiative of Jerzy Bartmiński, a first collection of such reconstructions was published (Bartmiński, 1980), a pilot edition of what later became the Dictionary of Folk Symbols and Stereotypes (SSSL, 1996- 2012). It contained several assumptions that were later discussed, verified, and developed in a number of articles, dictionary entries, master’s theses and doctoral dissertations. The first seven volumes of Etnolingwistyka comprise a systematic and methodical reconstruction of the Polish folk-understanding of such concepts as MOTHER, BROTHER, RAIN, SEA, STARS, RAINBOW, CAT, HORSE, etc. This first stage of the development of Polish ethnolinguistics, one that was based on multi-aspectual analysis of folkloric texts, was crowned by the 1996 publication of the first volume of SSSL. The dictionary, which resembles a thesaurus, has been planned to consist of seven volumes (each with several parts); the first volume was completed in 2012 with a publication of the last two of its four parts.4 The project is of fundamental importance to Polish culture and, internationally, it can perhaps be positioned alongside the Russian dictionary Славянские древности (1996-2009), which was compiled almost simultaneously.5 In 1996, the eighth volume of Etnolingwistyka came out in print not just in a different layout, but also with a clear editorial announcement that as of that moment and without abandoning its folklore tradition, the journal would more strongly emphasize the idea that ethnolinguistics focuses on language in all its varieties, including the standard variety, and on its relation to culture, people, and society. This eighth volume marks the beginning of the second stage of the development of Polish ethnolinguistics, which can be called “general linguistic” or “linguistic and cultural,” the two terms being applied to not only Polish, but generally Slavic data, and even data from outside the Slavic realm. It is

4 Volume 1: The Universe, Part 1: Sky, Heavenly Lights, Fire, Stones; Part 2: Earth, Water, Underground; Part 3: Meteorology, Part 4: World, Light, Metals. The thesaurus-like character of this compendium is also visible in the contents of the following volumes: Vol. 2: Plants, Vol. 3: Animals, Vol. 4: Man, Vol. 5: Society, Vol. 6: Religion, Demonology, Vol. 7: Time, Space, Measurements, Colors. 5 Vol. 1 – 1996, vol. 2 – 1999, vol. 3 – 2004, vol. 4 – 2009.

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symptomatic that the two-volume Etnolingwistyka 9/10 begins with papers in which central importance is assigned to the linguistic and cultural consequences of adopting the cognitivist approach not only as a specific methodology, but also, more broadly, as a cognitive attitude towards the object of research (Tokarski, 1998; Muszyński, 1998). From the Polish perspective, the cognitive orientation – sometimes only an inspiration – is not tantamount to a rejection of the principles and practices of structuralism, but rather complements them with several assumptions that lead to deeper, more comprehensive, and more adequate reconstructions of nationally-marked ways of conceptualizing the world. As a result of these theoretical assumptions, the concept of the cognitive definition was proposed, first outlined by Jerzy Bartmiński in the late 1970s and further developed in the 1990s (cf. Bartmiński, 1998; this volume). The cognitive definition is a cognitive frame targeted at stereotypical images of objects found in the world; its role is to represent their modular (multi-faceted) structure as well as the perspective and point of view of the speaking subject. In accordance with the “strong” interpretation of ethnolinguistics, the process of defining concepts departs from the taxonomic and scientifically-oriented approach of structural semantics, while in the “weaker’ interpretation, it all merges into a synthetic whole, a cognitive-descriptive instrument, which I once referred to as a “two-eyed perception of the world” (Chlebda, 1993). This broad and open methodological approach of Polish ethnolinguists is also manifested in the creation of a synthetic material basis for research, built according to the so- called DQT formula (Polish SAT). It stipulates that dictionaries, questionnaires, and texts be treated on an equal footing: dictionaries as repositories of systemic data (derived from non-lexicographic sources), questionnaires as “invoked data sources,” inquiring more directly into the minds of language users and their general knowledge, and finally texts of various types and genres, including poetry and other creative texts, as individual realizations of the potency of a language system.6 The methodological framework outlined above has given rise to a number of publications, both articles and monographs, focusing on reconstructing fragments

6 In my opinion, a material base should be compiled in accordance with the DCQT (Polish SKAT) formula, i.e. it should embrace dictionaries – corpora – questionnaires – texts. I distinguish between texts and corpora even though the latter essentially constitute collections of texts; nevertheless, these collections are balanced ones (i.e. compiled in accordance with specific criteria and proportions) while the texts for analysis are usually collected randomly and subjectively. As a result, the same questions considered with regard to texts and corpora yield different answers (see Chlebda 2010; esp. pp. 219-221). The problem of the non-use of corpora in the Lublin School is also mentioned by Underhill (this volume).

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of the linguistic worldview, penetrating both the contents and the dynamics of ethnic and cultural stereotypes as they change through time. These works have become a meeting place for researchers of different theoretical backgrounds and research interests, e.g. Andrzej Lewicki, a phraseologist, Jan Adamowski, a folklorist, Renata Grzegorczykowa, a semanticist, Hanna Popowska-Taborska, a dialectologist, Stanisława Niebrzegowska (later Niebrzegowska-Bartmińska), a textologist, Henryk Kardela, a cognitive linguist, Anna Pajdzińska, a researcher of the linguistic worldview entrenched in poetry, as well as the author of this chapter, a lexicographer. In addition, young corpus linguists have recently joined the ranks (Łukasz Grabowski). Scholars grouped around the Lublin center were primarily concerned with reproducing the hierarchy of values dominant or inherent in the fragments of reality subjected to study. On the assumption that the entire human existential space is axiologically-loaded, the researchers have outlined, using Jadwiga Puzynina’s theoretical and methodological framework for investigating the language of values, a project for a Polish axiological dictionary (cf. Bartmiński, 1989). They have gradually implemented an extensive research program focusing on Polish linguistic axiology; a volume entitled Nazwy wartości [Names of values] was published in 1993 (Bartmiński and Mazurkiewicz-Brzozowska, 1993); Język w kręgu wartości [Language in the sphere of values] appeared in 2003 (Bartmiński, 2003) and 2006 saw the publication of Język – wartości – polityka [Language – values – politics; Bartmiński, 2006a). At the time of the launching of the project, i.e. around 1989, when Poland became an axiological melting pot, the Ethnolinguistic School of Lublin planned (and, it is worth emphasizing, later completed) a series of questionnaire studies on the state of the axiological awareness of the young generation of Poles, conducted at regular ten-year intervals (1990, 2000, and 2010). A research report on the first two of these studies, the aforementioned volume on language, values, and politics, remains an important reference point for any empirical research on the Polish language of values. This research program has been a vibrant aspect of Polish ethnolinguistics. It is difficult to determine precisely what marks the third stage inthe development of ethnolinguistic research in Poland. Is it the sixteenth volume of Etnolingwistyka, at which point the journal became the organ of the Ethnolinguistic Section of the International Committee of Slavists? Or is it the eighteenth volume, with its discussion of the identity and status of ethnolinguistics as a scholarly discipline? Every discipline goes through a period of self-determination, a closer examination of the essence, scope, and object of its research, its distinctiveness and links with related fields and disciplines. In 2005, around the thirtieth anniversary of the commencement of Polish ethnolinguistic research, at a meeting of the Ethnolinguistic Section of the Committee on Linguistics (the Polish Academy of Sciences), the relations between ethnolinguistics and related disciplines were discussed by an ethnolinguist, a folklorist, a dialectologist,

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a cultural anthropologist, and a general linguist. The essence of this amiable discussion seems to be best reflected in the words of a dialectologist, Halina Pelcowa:

Dialectology has borrowed from ethnolinguistics the idea of the cognitive definition, the notion of the linguistic worldview, an opportunity to broaden analyses of dialects by incorporating considerations of customs, rituals, and beliefs. Ethnolinguistics has borrowed from dialectology a description of spoken language varieties, methods of collecting linguistic material in field research, the concept of the center and periphery, as well as the mapping of customs and cultural facts. (Pelcowa, 2006, p. 91)

The meeting revealed a reciprocal and mutually advantageous openness of different research disciplines with full respect for their distinctiveness. It is an attitude that makes Polish ethnolinguistics so attractive for subsequent generations of researchers from various specialties, including the youngest generation. Thus, when speaking of the Ethnolinguistic School of Lublin, the traditional meaning of the word school comes to the fore, namely an educational institution shaping the attitudes of young students of and researchers in philology, integrating scholars based in Lublin but also elsewhere, e.g. in Wrocław, Gdańsk, Kraków, Warsaw, and Opole. In retrospect, it seems that Polish ethnolinguistics needed a self-reflection on and strengthening of its self-identity in order to open up even wider to areas far less penetrated and to disciplines which had dealt with these areas before. Therefore, a visible sign of the third stage of the development of Polish ethnolinguistics is perhaps a later, the twentieth, volume of Etnolingwistyka, containing an explicitly formulated view of the discipline as concerned with communal identity. A similar view had been formulated by Jerzy Bartmiński much earlier, in his 1996 article with the telling title “Language as a carrier of national identity and a sign of openness” (Bartmiński, 1996), but only during the Fourteenth Congress of Slavists in Ohrid, Macedonia (2008) did this idea morph into a fully-fledged research program. In a joint paper, Jerzy Bartmiński and I spoke in Ohrid about the possibility of incorporating ethnolinguistics into the range of sciences that study group identities, primarily but not exclusively national identities, and positioning it on an equal footing alongside such identity- oriented disciplines as social psychology, sociology, or historiography (as a study of narratives interpreting reality, with particular emphasis on “interpreting”) (see Bartmiński & Chlebda, 2008). At the same time, my proposal was to bring ethnolinguistics closer to research on collective memory and collective oblivion, as it is memory/oblivion that is now widely considered to be the foundation of communal identity (Chlebda, 2011). And since identity, both individual and

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collective, is shaped in a never-ending confrontation of “me” with “not-me,” the ethnolinguistic preoccupation with identity has inevitably strengthened its comparative, cross-linguistic, and cross-cultural profile. A tangible outcome of this development was the launching of the seminar EUROJOS in 2009: EURO referring to “European,” and JOS to “the linguistic worldview “ (in Polish: językowy obraz świata). It is an initiative affiliated with the Institute of Slavic Studies at the Polish Academy of Sciences, headed by Maciej Abramowicz, president of the seminar’s Scientific Council. Its main objective is to coordinate the work of an international team of researchers who have conducted, based on the methodological framework developed by the Ethnolinguistic School of Lublin, a research project entitled “The linguistic and cultural worldview of Slavs in a comparative context.” At present, this project provides an analysis of five value-laden concepts: HOME/HOUSE (Pol. DOM), EUROPE (EUROPA), FREEDOM (WOLNOŚĆ), JOB/LABOR (PRACA), and HONOR (HONOR) – all of which are conceptualized differently in different national languages.7 Thus, when speaking about the function of Polish ethnolinguistics as a “philological keystone,” it is essential to realize that EUROJOS, a “flagship” of today’s Polish ethnolinguistics, gathers under a common banner a number of scholars from different generations, with different research interests, and from different countries – from the United States to Russia to Japan and Australia – and continues a long tradition of national and international collaborative ethnolinguistic research (let me just mention a well-known international research project on the understanding of the concept of HOMELAND in different national languages; cf. Bartmiński, 1993). The existence of a Polish school of ethnolinguistics, as distinct as the famous Moscow school, provides a stimulus for the development of ethnolinguistic research in countries that have not yet established their own schools of this kind. Alongside the publication of research works, a bibliographic database of the Lublin-based publications has been developed: the contents of twenty volumes of Etnolingwistyka and twenty-five volumes of the so-called “red series,” a book series published by Maria Curie- Skłodowska University Press (UMCS), all came out in book form, annotated with abstracts and indices of keywords (cf. Boguta & Matczuk, 2010; Maksymiuk- Pacek & Niebrzegowska-Bartmińska, 2008; Tomczak, Bartmiński, & Wasiuta, 2010). This demonstrates that Polish ethnolinguistics has developed in a non- random manner, with a clear view of its goals. Also, the fact that translations of Jerzy Bartmiński’s works, as well as those of other representatives of Polish

7 Although this is a comparative research, the starting point were the Polish words- concepts (in parentheses). For more information on EUROJOS, see www.ispan.waw.pl/ content/blogsection/29/188/lang,pl_PL.ISO8859-2/; last accessed February 19, 2013.

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ethnolinguistics, are being published today in the United Kingdom, the United States, Russia, Ukraine, or Serbia, reaffirms the importance and impact of this center of humanistic thought. The term humanistic thought, rather than ethnolinguistic thought, is used here deliberately because even this very sketchy outline of the development of Polish ethnolinguistics shows how far it has departed from its starting point in folklore. Its development can be seen in an overview of topics, titles, and entries contained in almost eighty volumes, monographs, collective works and dictionaries, including the twenty-volume series “Language and Culture” (Język a kultura) published in Wrocław, all of them products of more than thirty years of Polish ethnolinguistic research. Its range spans linguistic categorization of the world, the linguistics of space and time (especially the past), point of view, the speaking subject and subjectivity in language and culture, values in language, community discourse, barriers and bridges in communication, etc. When one adds to this a discussion of certain ever-present questions concerning cultural and national identity, as well as increasingly frequent questions concerning collective memory and oblivion, it becomes clear that Polish ethnolinguistics treats the fundamental problems of the modern humanities. At the same time, it does not display any expansionist tendencies; rather than appropriating other areas of scholarship, it willingly opens itself up to the benefits of these areas, to their ideas and experience, and with similar willingness it is ready to share with them its own resources and experience. (Incidentally, it is still a rather one-sided and unidirectional openness, as some disciplines in Polish humanities have not yet discovered ethnolinguistics and its achievements for themselves – but this is an altogether different matter.) Should one inquire what allows for this real or potential interdisciplinary research, the answer could be subsumed under the shape of a triangle (Fig. 1.1), whose vertices stand for the notions of “culture,” memory,” and “identity,” whose interior is filled with the semantic content of the termsubject (that is, subjectivity, or more precisely, community multi-subjectivity8), and with language, resembling a connective tissue and permeating the entire figure. Such a triangle could be conventionally referred to as a “philological keystone of the humanities,” in the broadest sense of the latter as disciplines oriented toward an understanding of man.

8 A community understood as a collective subject is not monolithic, and therefore such notions as, e.g., the “Polish linguistic worldview,” are mental shortcuts. In one ethnic community, there may co-occur a number of different linguistic worldviews, whose collective amalgam may be referred to as the “linguistic worldview (of Poles).” Behind this multifarious structure one may find not a collective subject, but rather a collective (communal) multi-subjectivity. Cf. in this context the concept of a “multiplicity of collective memories in Poland” (Nijakowski, 2008, pp. 145-189).

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Fig. 1.1 A “philological keystone of the humanities” in diagrammatic form

Many disciplines within the humanities would readily find their place in such a scheme because various configurations of culture, identity, memory, and subjectivity occur in a number of them. But it is ethnolinguistics that puts at the center of its interest culture, identity, collective memory, and subjectivity, as well as the linguistic, or better, the linguified nature of all these phenomena.9 It performs an analysis of them with continuously developing instruments of linguistic research. Ethnolinguistics, which appears to be constituted by the contents of the “keystone” triangle, is capable of and ready to enter into interactive relationships with disciplines that study multifaceted understandings of human beings and the communities they create. I believe that the role of ethnolinguistics as a philological keystone could be tested by confronting two great mental constructs: the Polish collective memory, on the one hand, and the Polish linguistic worldview, on the other. The contents of these two constructs have been substantially reconstructed, respectively, in studies into collective memory and in ethnolinguistics. But while the constructs have a clear tertium comparationis,10 the reconstructions, as presented in

9 The concept of “linguification,” although used in the humanities, has not been precisely and unambiguously defined. I presented my own understanding of it with reference to (collective) memory in Chlebda (2012). 10 It is possible to identify five features common to collective memory and linguistic worldview, which constitute the tertium: 1. reference to reality; 2. an interpretation of this reality; 3. linguification (the presence of linguistic exponents manifested in narratives); 4. subjectivity (community multi-subjectivity); 5. a capacity to shape communal identity. Each feature requires a separate description.

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monographs, in hundreds of articles and in dictionaries, have never been juxtaposed or confronted with each other, let alone being – if only fragmentarily – merged. The significance of the results of such a meeting of disciplines can hardly be overestimated.

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References

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (Ed.). (1980). Słownik ludowych stereotypów językowych. Zeszyt próbny. Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (1989). Projekt i założenia ogólne słownika aksjologicznego. In Jerzy Bartmiński & Jadwiga Puzynina (Eds.), Język a kultura. Vol. 2: Zagadnienia leksykalne i aksjologiczne (pp. 293-312). Wrocław: Wydawnictwo „Wiedza o Kulturze”.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (Ed.). (1990). Folklor – język – poetyka. Wrocław: Ossolineum.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (Ed.). (1993). Pojęcie ojczyzny we współczesnych językach europejskich. Lublin: Wydawnictwo Instytutu Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (1996). Język nośnikiem tożsamości narodowej i przejawem otwartości. In Leon Dyczewski OFMConv (Ed.), Tożsamość polska i otwartość na inne społeczeństwa (pp. 39-59). Lublin: Wydawnictwo TN KUL.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (1998). Definicja kognitywna jako narzędzie opisu konotacji słowa. In Jerzy Bartmiński (Ed.), Konotacja (pp. 169-185). Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (Ed.). (2003). Język w kręgu wartości. Studia semantyczne. Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (Ed.). (2004 [1990]). Językowy obraz świata. 2nd ed. Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (Ed.). (2006a). Język – wartości – polityka. Zmiany rozumienia nazw wartości w okresie transformacji ustrojowej w Polsce. Raport z badań empirycznych. Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

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Bartmiński, Jerzy. (2006b). Językowe podstawy obrazu świata. Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (2009/2012). Aspects of Cognitive Ethnolinguistics. Ed. Jörg Zinken. Sheffield and Oakville, CT: Equinox.

Bartmiński, Jerzy, & Chlebda, Wojciech. (2008). Jak badać językowo-kulturowy obraz świata Słowian i ich sąsiadów? Etnolingwistyka, 20, 11-27.

Bartmiński, Jerzy, & Mazurkiewicz-Brzozowska, Małgorzata. (Eds.). (1993). Nazwy wartości. Studia leksykalno-semantyczne. Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Boguta, Agnieszka & Matczuk, Alicja. (Eds.). (2010). Bibliografia analityczna „czerwonej serii” 1981-2008. Tomy 1-25. Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Chlebda, Wojciech. (1993). Słownik a „dwuoczne postrzeganie świata”. In Jerzy Bartmiński & Ryszard Tokarski (Eds.), O definicjach i definiowaniu (pp. 195-205). Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Chlebda, Wojciech. (2010). Wstępne założenia analizy słownikowej w projekcie badawczym EUROJOS. In Wojciech Chlebda (Ed.), Etnolingwistyka a leksykografia. Tom poświęcony Profesorowi Jerzemu Bartmińskiemu (pp. 219-226). Opole: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Opolskiego.

Chlebda, Wojciech. (2011). Szkice do językowego obrazu pamięci. Pamięć jako wartość. Etnolingwistyka, 23, 83-98.

Chlebda, Wojciech. (2012). Pamięć ujęzykowiona. In Jan Adamowski & Marta Wójcicka (Eds.), Tradycja dla współczesności, vol. 6: Pamięć jako kategoria rzeczywistości kulturowej (pp. 109-119). Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Collins English Dictionary. (2009). Complete and Unabridged 10th Edition. HarperCollins Publishers. Accessed at www.dictionary.com, July 16, 2012.

Kiklewicz, Aleksander, & Wilczewski, Michał. (2011). Współczesna lingwistyka kulturowa: zagadnienia dyskusyjne (na marginesie monografii Jerzego Bartmińskiego Aspects of Cognitive Ethnolinguistics). Biuletyn Polskiego Towarzystwa Językoznawczego, LXVII, 165-178.

Maksymiuk-Pacek, Beata & Niebrzegowska-Bartmińska, Stanisława. (Eds.). (2008). Bibliografia adnotowana lubelskiego zespołu etnolingwistycznego (do roku 2009). Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

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Muszyński, Zbysław. (1998). Indywidualizm w ujmowaniu języka i kultury jako konsekwencja kognitywizmu. Etnolingwistyka, 9/10, 25-49.

Nijakowski, Lech. (2008). Polska polityka pamięci. Esej socjologiczny. Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Akademickie i Profesjonalne.

Pelcowa, Halina. (2006). Dialektologia a etnolingwistyka. Etnolingwistyka, 18, 91-103.

Славянские древности: Энциклопедический словарь в пяти томах. (1996-2009). Ed. Н. И. Толстой, Москва: Международные отношения.

SSSL. (1996-2012). Słownik stereotypów i symboli ludowych. [Dictionary of Folk Stereotypes and Symbols] Vol. 1 (1-4). Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Tokarski, Ryszard. (1998). Językowy obraz świata a niektóre założenia kognitywizmu. Etnolingwistyka, 9/10, 7-24.

Tomczak, Łukasz, Bartmiński, Jerzy, & Wasiuta, Sebastian. (Eds.). (2010). „Etnolingwistyka”. Bibliografia adnotowana 1988-2008. Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Underhill, James W. (2009). Humboldt, Worldview and Language. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Translated by Łukasz Grabowski

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Part I THE LINGUISTIC WORLDVIEW AND THE POETIC TEXT

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Chapter 2 The Linguistic Worldview and literature

Anna Pajdzińska UMCS, Lublin, Poland

1. The origin of the linguistic worldview idea

Language is usually viewed as a social tool, a means of expressing thoughts and emotions, a sign system used for communicating with and influencing others. But it can also be viewed as a “symbolic guide to culture” (Sapir, 1961 [1929], p. 70). The cultural aspect of language was already recognized by the Ancient Greeks. Two major debates, referred to as the phýsei vs. thései debate and the analogists vs. anomalists debate, involved nearly all distinguished Greek philosophers, later also philologists and grammarians, and centered around the language-world relationship: is it natural or conventional? Can language, as a tool for naming things and phenomena, provide us with a knowledge of reality and if so, to what extent? Do words derive from the nature of objects or are they conventionally assigned labels? Is there a proportionality (analogy) or a mere anomaly between language and reality? The debates were continued in the Middle Ages as a controversy involving universals: what corresponds to words denoting general concepts? According to realists, elements of reality do, whereas according to nominalists, nothing really does, general concepts being merely products of the human mind. In the 15th and 16th centuries, as more and more languages were studied, it became progressively clearer that there is no strict correspondence between them (cf. Martin Luther’s 1530 Sendbrief vom Dollmetschen). In subsequent centuries, interest in languages on the part of philosophers increased again. Until the end of the 19th century, attempts to find or construct a universal language were repeatedly made, and many remarks found in philosophical treatises continue to arouse interest up to this day. For example, Francis Bacon claimed that the structure and characteristic properties of languages, as tools constructed and used by language communities, indirectly testify to the spiritual and psychological qualities of these communities. John Locke, in turn, noticed that each language contains several words without equivalents in other languages. They express, claimed Locke, complex ideas as derivatives of the customs and lifestyle of a given nation. Also Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz treated languages as a source of knowledge about their users, as the best reflection of human minds.

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The 18th and 19th-century German philosophers Johann Gottfried Herder and Wilhelm von Humboldt, as well as Johann Georg Hamann before them, underscored a bidirectional influence between language and its users: language is a manifestation of the psychic life of a given community (the nation’s spirit), i.e. a form of consciousness. The community leaves its mark on the language it is using and can also be recognized through it. But language, says Humboldt, does not only reflect human consciousness: it also shapes it. Between the intellectually active speaker and the outside world intervenes that speaker’s mother tongue with its specific and characteristic interpretation of reality – thus, how the world is experienced depends on language. However, there is no determinism here: even though one’s native language puts a magic ring around its users’ cognition, every creative speech event is to a certain degree an attempt to move beyond that ring, in the same way that is involved in learning a foreign language with its distinct conceptual network and worldview. For Humboldt, a complete understanding of objective reality is not possible – but that is not a cause for concern. On the contrary, thanks to this aprioristic imperfection, the processes of cognitive and epistemological enrichment and thinking in language are in fact unbounded.

2. Two sources of the Linguistic Worldview Theory

Humboldt’s ideas found fertile ground in the thinking of 20th-century German linguists gathered around the figure of Leo Weisgerber, i.e. the Neo-Humboldtians. Their major goal was to uncover the cognitive content entrenched in one’s mother tongue (Muttersprache) and transmitted from one generation to another (hence a different name for the approach: inhaltbezogene Grammatik, the grammar of content). They mainly analyzed the structuring of the lexicon into semantic fields; this they deemed to be the best method of identifying the fragments of the world made salient through a given language, as well as those that the language fails to “notice.” The linguists argued that

we need not only see language as a means of communication but as a creative strength of the spirit. The fact that a language has a certain body of lexis and a certain syntax means that it contains a segmentation of the world which is not inherent in things but precisely in language. Every language is a means of accessing the world; every language community is constituted by a common worldview contained in its mother tongue. (Christmann, 1967, p. 442)

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Beisdes the term sprachliches Weltbild, which replaced Humboldt’s Weltansicht,1 another important term for Neo-Humboldtians was sprachliche Zwischenwelt. This intermediary linguistic world they took to be the result of transforming, by a given speech community, the perceived (material, substantial, physical) world into the world of consciousness, i.e. the intellectual and conceptual world. It is an intermediary being, situated between the speaker and the outside world, and influencing the speaker’s view of that world. There is also a striking similarity, which suggests an inspiration and influence, between the views of German idealists and those of American ethnolinguists. Research on Native American communities led Franz Boas to the conclusion that language depends on culture and so it is legitimate to treat it as a testimony to culture. Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf,2 in their descriptions of Native American languages and comparisons thereof with English, discovered several deeply rooted differences on the level of lexis and grammar. They also noticed a correlation between linguistic forms and human behavior, which led them to a view of the language-culture interface as bidirectional influence. However, the so-called “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis” or the linguistic relativity/determinism hypothesis is a double misnomer: (i) it is an in-line juxtaposition of apparently equipollent terms whose import as to the role of language is in fact different, and (ii) it suggests that Sapir professed linguistic relativity, whereas his disciple had more radical views. In fact, the works of both scholars contain statements that modulate the “hypothesis” in numerous ways. Linguistic relativity assumes that there are differences between the perception of the world entrenched in languages from different cultures (as well as conceptual differences within the same national language), whereas determinists would have us believe that a national language actually conditions human cognition: as a result, people who speak different languages live, in a sense, in different worlds.

1 For a discussion of these and other terms, their connotations and (mis)interpretations, cf. Underhill (2009) and (2011). 2 Whorf even uses the notion of world view and attributes it to the working of a language or languages, cf. for example: The participants in a given world view are not aware of the idiomatic nature of the channels in which their talking and thinking run, and are perfectly satisfied with them, regarding them as logical inevitables. But take an outsider, a person accustomed to widely different language and culture, or even a scientist of a later era using somewhat different language of the same basic type, and not all that seems logical and inevitable to the participants in the given world view seems so to him. (Whorf, 1956 [1940], p. 222) The most succinct formulation of the idea, however, seems to come from Stuart Chase, the author of the Foreword to Whorf’s Language, Thought, and Reality, who finds in the latter linguist’s unpublished monograph the idea that “[r]esearch is needed to discover the world view of many unexplored languages, some now in danger of extinction” (Chase, 1956, p. x).

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3. Language as an interpretation of the world

No convincing arguments have been adduced so far to accept or reject the deterministic view. Relativity, on the other hand, is well-documented: for several decades evidence has been accumulating that every language is an interpretation, not a reflection of the world in the sense of a one-to-one mapping between them. Differences between languages lie deep: they are not merely formal or superficial. A language consolidates the cognitive experience of the community it serves, or more precisely, of the various generations and groups within the community, each of which may approach the same fragment of reality form a different viewpoint, following its own sentiments and needs. In consequence, the linguistic worldview that results is complex, multi-layered, heterogenic, and dynamic: it derives from continually occurring cognitive acts, whose effects accumulate, coexist, change, supplant, or are superimposed upon one another. Thus, although the linguistic worldview is in a sense conservative or anachronistic, as linguistic change is slower than social or cultural change, the dynamism of change is incessant: language on the one hand imposes a certain conceptualization of reality upon its users, on the other hand it allows speakers to overcome the limitations of that conceptualization, to move beyond its boundaries. Every language models the world in a way that makes it possible for members of the relevant speech community to function in it properly. The modeling is composed of several interlinked operations: • segmentation of the world, i.e. identification of things and phenomena important for the speech community concerned; • interpretation of these things and phenomena, ascription of features to them; the feature that is the most conspicuous from the point of view of a given community usually becomes the name-providing distinguishing mark; • ordering of things and phenomena, delineating the relationships between them; • a multi-aspectual valuation of things and states of affairs, in which an especially prominent role is played by conceptual categories that organize a given worldview: anthropocentrism and the “us–them” opposition. In the processes of modeling the world, the latter is constantly being adjusted to human cognitive capacities: its complexity is reduced, its changeability and flow of events are weakened, and experiential chaos is transformed into an order. An interpretation of the world characteristic of a given language can be expressed with diverse means: the semantic structures of lexemes, the number of items in a given lexico-semantic domain (the more important the domain, the more items it usually contains), etymology, word-formational and semantic motivation of lexemes, acts of naming, and the process of metaphorization. However, a view of the world is entrenched not only in the lexicon but also in

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morphological and syntactic structures, as well as in a language’s grammatical categories. The grammar of each language encodes a certain body of meanings, expressed in an often mandatory and automatized manner. Speakers are usually not aware of their existence, let alone of their interpretive nature. Almost any information can be conveyed in any language but its lexical or grammatical modulation may differ, and its expression in one language may be easier than in others, with aspects of meaning being more or less obligatory. What view of the world is entrenched in a language obviously depends on the natural living conditions of its community, i.e. the topography, climate, etc., but to the same extent – if not more so – on its culture.

4. Language as the Raw material of literature: implications

It took a long time for scholars to realize the consequences of the fact that literature builds on language as its raw material. Principles of ancient provenance – a good genological pattern, its application in a specific situation, a clear theme and its rhetorical elaboration in accordance with the norms of a given genre – were still in operation in the Enlightenment. Apart from formal requirements, the poetic value of one’s work depended on whether and how the content was idealized or sublimated. It was only in late 18th century that universal rules, applied for the work of art to have an esthetic value, were counterbalanced by that work as an expression of a nation’s spirit. The idea of poetry as a national artifact appeared in opposition to the universalism of the classic model,3 and the idea of the significance of folk literature emerged as a counterpoint to the theory’s elitism. By underscoring national aspects and conditioning of poetry, national languages became the center of attention in a natural way. Admittedly, Georg Hegel, while discussing various types of artistic activity in his Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, attributed a greater role to the content of a literary work of art than to its linguistic matter. He explained it in the following way: although content in literature is realized through language, something else emerges between the linguistic sign (which he considered a “means of spiritual expression” rather than “an end in itself”, Hegel 1886, no page) and what the sign refers to – namely, an internal view, image, or representation, which becomes the center for cognizing. The arbitrary nature of the sign makes it so that its

3 I.e., the imitation of ancient Greek and Roman patterns, with attention being paid to universal, timeless ideals rather than those related to national or more local contexts.

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role in poetic expression is decidedly smaller than the role of raw material in painting or sculpture. However, the already mentioned Johann Gottfried Herder, over a quarter of a century before Hegel, viewed the role of language in poetry somewhat differently. He wrote: “The spirit of the language ... is also the spirit of the nation’s literature... It is therefore impossible to comprehend the literature of a nation without knowing its language; it is only through language that you can come to knowledge of the literature” (Fragmente über die neuere deutsche Literatur. Erste Sammlung von Fragmenten, translated from Skwarczyńska, 1965, p. 64). One can also deduce that for Herder, poets build their works from the material of the very grammatical structure of language. For example, he considered how much content can be extracted from the allegedly redundant – according to Cartesians – gender distinctions of inanimate nouns, found only in some languages and even there realized differently from language to language. The most forceful view on the relatedness of poetry and language was expressed by Wilhelm von Humboldt at the very end of the 18th century when he wrote that poetry is art practiced through language. In his view, poetry must “work language through and through” (because language transforms everything into general concepts) in order to activate its potential to move from the general to the specific, from the abstract to the concrete. In her interpretation of Humboldt’s work, Zdzisława Kopczyńska (1976, p. 189) writes: “In the two directions of poetic endeavor that he mentions, language is the main element: it does not only define each of the two directions but is in fact decisive in shaping their diversity.” One extreme is “the use of language as a means or an instrument in poetry as art, i.e. for the shaping ... of the poetic work by making use of those aspects of the language potential that render it effective as a tool.” A radically different situation is when “language itself, as it were, decides the nature of the poetic work. Here poetry does not so much utilize the defining properties of language but absorbs them, acquiring in the process a significant degree of autonomy as a form of artistic expression.” For Wilhelm Scherer, writing in the second half of the 19th century, it is no longer the psychology or the history of a nation that constitutes the essence of historical and literary inquiry. It was clear to him that poetry is “a kind of attitude to language and [that it] operates within language use”; it is “an art of speech,” and an “artistic employment of language” (Scherer, 1977 [1888], p. 9). Polish authors also contributed to the discussion on the mutual relationship between the national language and the language of poetry, on the role of poetry in the development of the national language, and the poetic potential of language. Kazimierz Brodziński (1964 [1818]), for example, took note of the properties of national languages. He viewed the Romantic spirit of the Germans as appropriate and understandable, since it was motivated by the German tradition and the German language. In Poland, however, the tradition is closer to the classical aura. It is matched by a language that does not easily fit in with

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the Romantic spirit due to its “ancient classical structure,”4 “freedom, frankness and conciseness,” “an almost inexhaustible potential for semantic shading,” “a striking logic,” and “a natural clarity and common sense.” An interdependence of national characteristics and language was also assumed by Leon Borowski (1820), whose research on poetry and elocution rested on the idea that “the spirit of nations and the spirit of their speech are such close companions that one always speaks through the other” (in Kopczyńska, 1976, p. 88). Contrary to Brodziński, Borowski did not have a high opinion of the Polish literary tradition and criticized it for blindly following foreign patterns, without a “clear national taste.” He did believe, however, that the Polish language, which had preserved its “power and valor,” can facilitate an outstanding development of Polish poetry. In the debate on the linguistic raw material of literature, a momentous role was played by the phenomenological theory of a literary work of art. According to Roman Ingarden, all extralinguistic artistically relevant elements of the work ultimately derive from linguistic creations in that work and from their properties. Some esthetically significant qualities directly depend on the shape of those creations or derive from the complexity and expressiveness of syntactic structure. Linguistic creations in a literary work of art play, therefore, a double role: first, they determine all other elements of the work, and second, they function themselves as the work’s elements. It is thanks to their presence and meaning that specific esthetic qualities are realized. Thanks to the structuralist approach it became obvious that an artistic text, especially poetry, is a unique arrangement of elements in which everything has semantic value. Even before it enters the work, the raw material of literature is meaningful and structured – this is not the case in other kinds of artistic endeavor. Limitations imposed on a material of this kind help reveal novel semantic qualities and a new sequence of meanings is superimposed over the sequence of linguistic meanings. Textual meanings are also hidden in the very structure of linguistic signs and their larger complexes, in linguistic arrangements and configurations. All components are interlinked and constitute a functional whole, irreducible to any of them individually. That whole, in turn, is not meaningful in itself but in relation to higher-order structures: it is usually interpreted against the backdrop of the language system and literary tradition, but its relativized value in terms of the linguistic worldview also seems relevant. This idea appeared already in the work of the Tartu semiotic school, in which every national language was treated as a primary modeling system. For example, Yuri Lotman frequently underscored the fact that linguistic structure systematizes the signs of the code, turning them into tools for transmission of information and

4 The relatedness of Polish and Latin was for Brodziński unquestionable.

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at the same time reflecting people’s views of reality. Since linguistic structure preserves human cognitive acts, the writer works with the material that contains, in a condensed form, the centuries-old activity of a given speech community whose members have made an effort to know the world. This reflection, however, was all too weakly shared, if indeed shared at all, by literary scholars. An obvious, not to say a banal view in contemporary humanities is that living with others in a community is impossible without assuming a certain common worldview, a kind of frame of reference for all the endeavors of the community’s members. It appears, however, that this idea is still insufficiently appreciated, or else accepted without due reflection on the fact that a common worldview is to a large extent shaped by a common language. If language is an interpretation of reality or a way of seeing the world, the categories and values cherished by a linguistic community should also be taken into account in interpretations of literary texts. Even if one assumes that literary texts are radically different from other kinds of text in their very essence, their intentions and execution, even if the author – in his or her desire to enrich and extend the knowledge of people and the world, to express the inexpressible, to access a mystery, etc. – continually strives to go beyond the limits of language in its communicative function, “everything that a work contains ... must go through the medium of language” (Mukařovský, 1970, p. 169). This, says Mukařovský, “at the same time refers to an internal connection of a work ... with the society achieved precisely through language.” A similar thought had been formulated even more emphatically by Edward Sapir: “The understanding of a simple poem, for instance, involves not merely an understanding of the single words in their average significance, but a full comprehension of the whole life of the community as it is mirrored in the words, or as it is suggested by their overtones” (Sapir, 1961 [1929], p. 69).

5. Poetic exemplification

In order to realize how important it is to take note of the linguistic worldview in an analysis of a literary text, let us consider a few examples. They all come from the work of the Polish poet and Nobel Prize winner, Wisława Szymborska. In her poem Conversation with a Stone,5 a person is talking to an unusual interlocutor. Is it, however, a coincidental interlocutor? Perhaps not: other objects are mentioned

5 The English translations of Szymborska’s poems, by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh, come from Szymborska (2001). For a discussion of the linguistic view of Czech kámen ‘stone’ and some examples of its poetic elaboration, cf. Vaňková this volume.

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in the poem – a leaf, a drop of water, a hair – but these remain backgrounded. By choosing a stone out of many possible elements of nature, the poet was probably guided by the suggestiveness of its image in the Polish language. For a speaker of Polish, kamień ‘stone’ is not only “a piece of rock, usually hard, compact and heavy” (a dictionary definition) but has numerous semantic connotations, e.g. the fact that it is inanimate motivates the feature ‘immobile’ (cf. skamienieć ‘turn into stone, fossilize, petrify,’ siedzieć kamieniem ‘sit still,’ or bodajby się w kamień zamienił ‘may he turn into stone’), while the prototypical hardness is metaphorically extended to yield the meaning of ‘insensitive, unaffected, strict, unemotional, unfeeling, ruthless’ (cf. ktoś jest (twardy) jak kamień ‘someone is hard as a rock,’ kamień nie człowiek ‘he’s a stone, not a human being,’ kamień by się poruszył ‘this would move a stone,’ ktoś jest z kamienia ‘someone is made of stone,’ kamienne serce ‘a heart of stone,’ kamienna twarz ‘a stone face’). This characterization is evoked in the poem when the stone responds to the human speaker’s words “My mortality should touch you” with “I’m made of stone ... and therefore must keep a straight face.” In making such ample use of the linguistic view of kamień, Szymborska – by choosing a stone for the interlocutor – rejects an important feature that results from the object’s inanimateness, namely its inability to speak. The expressions milczeć jak kamień ‘to be silent as a grave’ (lit. ‘as a stone’), kamienna cisza/ kamienne milczenie ‘dead (lit. stony) silence’ show that for Polish speakers stones belong to the realm of the silent and are unassociated with sounds, let alone with speech.6 In the poem, the stone is not only endowed with the ability to speak, but its conversational function is actually stronger than that of the human speaker. The latter’s request repeatedly meets with the stone’s rejection. The stone’s unquestionable dominance is surprising because it contradicts our conviction, which derives from our use of language, that humans are the most important “components” of the world, and as such they occupy the highest position in the earthly hierarchy of beings. Why have these requests been rejected? What do they concern? At the very beginning of the conversation, one reads:

I want to enter your insides, have a look around, breathe my fill of you.

6 Connections of stones with speech can be found in broader culture. For example, in the biblical Book of Habakkuk (2, 6-11) the stone in the house built on bloodshed and evil gain will cry out against the oppressor. In Luke’s Gospel (19, 40), in turn, Jesus says that even if the crowd in Jerusalem keep silent, the stones will cry out. These, however, are exceptional and hypothetical situations: people’s behavior is so outrageous that it provokes verbal reaction from otherwise mute stones.

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At the end of it, in turn, the human interlocutor asks:

It’s only me, let me come in. I haven’t got two thousand centuries, so let me come under your roof.

In order to interpret this, we must again make recourse to the linguistic worldview idea. These poetic contexts rather clearly imply certain properties of a stone that may be absent from its linguistic portrayal but that derive from that portrayal. ‘Hardness’ motivates ‘durability’ and ‘permanence,’ and these turn a stone into a symbol of longevity or even of existence. From this, there is only a stone’s throw from viewing it as a source of life.7 It is precisely this characteristic that is indirectly expressed through breathe my fill of you. In Polish, the linguistic metaphors motivated by one of the most fundamental human experiences, i.e. breathing, express the notion of being alive: ktoś jeszcze oddycha ‘someone is still alive’ (lit. ‘is still breathing’), do ostatniego tchu/tchnienia ‘to the last breath,’ ktoś ledwo/ledwie dyszy/dycha ‘someone is barely alive’ (lit. ‘can hardly breathe’), ktoś oddał/wydał ostanie tchnienie ‘someone breathed their last,’ ktoś/coś jest dla kogoś jak powietrze ‘someone/ something is indispensable to someone else to live’ (lit. ‘like the air’).8 The human subject in Szymborska’s poem does not fully realize his or her own fault in the failed conversation. A human perspective, a human ordering and evaluation of the world, is never cast away: the stone is approached like an artifact, the speaker knocks at the stone’s front door and says:

I want to enter your insides, […] I mean to stroll through your palace, […] I hear you have great empty halls inside you, unseen, their beauty in vain, soundless, not echoing anyone’s steps.

7 Certain cultural facts show that a stone’s hardness and immobility are no obstacles to treating it as a living creature or even a life-giver. In Europe, until the end of the 17th century it was assumed that “stones are conceived, grow and mature in the depths of the Earth... Hence there originates a connection, frequent in various cultures, between stones and the earth’s symbolism of fertility: fertility is drawn from the earth via stones. A second source of stone’s symbolism of fertility is the belief that they are inhabited by the spirits of one’s ancestors and mediate in the transmission of fertility from them” (Brzozowska, 1996, p. 349). 8 More on linguistic and artistic metaphors with the source domain of breathing can be found in Pajdzińska (1999). Incidentally, similar metaphorical processes can also be found in English, cf. with one’s last/dying breath, to be the breath of life to somebody or to breathe one’s last.

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The stone is thus not viewed as a part of nature but as an architectonic form, an expression of a human creative attitude to the world’s primeval shape. This is the sin of pride: the world is portrayed only from the human perspective, and if there is no human viewer, then beauty is “in vain.” The poem thus makes ample use of one of the most important categories that organize the worldviews entrenched in natural languages (and not only in Polish), namely anthropocentrism.9 The anthropocentric perspective, however, is questioned on two levels: on the level of creative action (by instituting an asymmetry between the interlocutors) and on the level of the human speaker’s linguistic behavior. The conversation is based on two categories of speech acts: request and refusal. The requester is by definition lower than his/ her interlocutor in the conversational hierarchy, since it is the addressee that decides about whether to agree or not. In Szymborska’s poem, perhaps contrary to the reader’s expectations, the balance tilts to the stone’s side. The human interlocutor’s weaker position symbolizes people’s general existential situation: alienation, loneliness, and fear of death. To enter matter (the stone’s insides) would be to return to the state of primeval unity, escape from the price one pays for functioning in culture and away from nature, that is, from the feeling of lonesomeness and from the awareness of ineluctable death. But it turns out that nature and culture are mutually impenetrable. Indeed, a life embedded in culture, deemed as superior to nature, precludes one from a familiarity with the latter. The senses, which condition human cognitive interaction with the world, are brushed aside by the stone as “poor.” The human speaker is said to lack “the sense of taking part,” and “no other sense can make up for your missing sense of taking part.” It is people themselves who, by severing links with nature and occupying a more lofty position, have triggered their own alienation. Let us now consider a fragment from another poem by Szymborska, Birthday (Urodziny), in which the speaker describes what falls to one’s lot on the day one is born: one is presented with an unusual gift, the world, with all its richness, complexity and changeability, its uniqueness and inimitability. The world’s ontic nature is such that a human being can never and nowhere absorb it in its fullness. The speaking ego’s monolog ends with:

9 This category is a natural consequence of the fact that language is a human creation: it presents the world as it is seen through human eyes for the benefit of humans. Anthropocentrism is manifested both at the level of grammar (cf. the natural hierarchy of arguments implied by the predicate, in which the highest rank is reserved for those with the selectional restriction ‘human’) and lexical (the human point of view is reflected in the quantitative structure of the lexicon, in the meanings of lexical items; it can motivate regularities of metaphorical processes or restrictions in lexico-semantic valence).

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Na chwilę tu jestem i tylko na chwilę: co dalsze, przeoczę, a resztę pomylę. Nie zdążę wszystkiego odróżnić od próżni. Pogubię te bratki w pośpiechu podróżnym. Już choćby najmniejszy – szalony wydatek: fatyga łodygi i listek, i płatek raz jeden w przestrzeni, od nigdy, na oślep, wzgardliwie dokładny i kruchy wyniośle.10

I am just passing through, it’s a five-minute stop. I won’t catch what is distant: what’s too close, I’ll mix up. While trying to plumb what the void’s inner sense is, I’m bound to pass by all these poppies and pansies. What a loss when you think how much effort was spent perfecting this petal, this pistil, this scent for the one-time appearance, which is all they’re allowed, so aloofly precise and so fragilely proud.

The speaker will not succeed in “trying to plumb what the void’s inner sense is” – the void that one faces at birth and will face at the end of one’s life journey.11 The unusual nature of all existence is symbolized by the Polish bratek ‘pansy.’ The choice of this minute fragment of reality is far from haphazard: its very name, derived from brat ‘brother,’ underscores brotherhood and common fate. Similarly to a human being, bratek is an individual and a particular entity. The speaker extends that similarity, attributing to the flower certain characteristics typically reserved to humans: in order to look a certain way, the plant spends effort, perfects its petals, its precision aloof and fragility proud. At the same time, the expressions od nigdy ‘since never,’ na oślep ‘blindly’ (in the English translation rendered as which is all they’re allowed) signal a fundamental difference between humans and the pansy (which, incidentally, represents other entities through synecdoche). The unusual syntagm od nigdy, which consists of the preposition od ‘since, from,’ marking the beginning of some state, and the adverb nigdy ‘never, at no point

10 Quoted from Szymborska (1977, p. 172). 11 The conceptual metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY is evoked by the Polish w pośpiechu podróżnym ‘hastily when one is traveling,’ rendered here as “I’m bound to pass by.” This is a creative complementation of numerous linguistic metaphors in Polish, e.g. ktoś wybrał właściwą/niewłaściwą drogę ‘someone has chosen the right/wrong path,’ ktoś stoi na rozdrożu ‘someone is at a crossroads,’ ktoś jest na zakręcie ‘someone is at the crossroads’ (lit. ‘someone is taking a bend’), ktoś i ktoś idą wspólną drogą ‘someone is walking with someone else along the same road/path.’ It is also a frequent literary motif.

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in time,’ suggests that although time is a parameter for every being, not all beings are aware of the fact. The other expression, na oślep ‘blindly, without thinking or paying attention to the surroundings,’ stresses the unreflective nature of purely biological existence. Therefore, paradoxically, all elements in a person’s surroundings, even the most minute, as well as that person him- or herself, contribute with their being hic et nunc to the continuous presence and omnipresence of the world. But it is only to a human being that this omnipresence comes forth as fundamental and captivating. The human speaker in the poem has no illusions: only a tiny fragment of the abundance can be enjoyed and absorbed. Finally, we will look at the poem View with a Grain of Sand, which forcefully makes the reader reflect on the relationship between language and the world. Average speakers do not usually treat language as a complex cognitive system that facilitates mentally locating oneself in the world or as an interpretive network superimposed on reality; rather, they are prone to consider the analysis of the world suggested by their mother tongue as undisputable and natural. However, an awareness of the fact that every language captures reality in a symbolic manner, i.e. has a formative and a limiting role in relation to thinking, permeating even people’s direct experience, is frequently present in poetry. In Szymborska’s View with a Grain Sand it is mainly through language that people and the world are juxtaposed:

Zwiemy je ziarnkiem piasku. A ono siebie ani ziarnkiem, ani piasku. Obywa się bez nazwy ogólnej, szczególnej, przelotnej, trwałej, mylnej czy właściwej.

Na nic mu nasze spojrzenie, dotknięcie. Nie czuje się ujrzane i dotknięte. A to, że spadło na parapet okna, to tylko nasza, nie jego przygoda. Dla niego to to samo, co spaść na cokolwiek, bez pewności, czy spadło już, czy spada jeszcze.12

12 From Szymborska (1986, pp. 11-12).

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We call it a grain of sand, but it calls itself neither grain nor sand. It does just fine, without a name, whether general, particular, permanent, passing, incorrect, or apt.

Our glance, our touch means nothing to it. It doesn’t feel itself seen and touched. And that it fell on the windowsill is only our experience, not its. For it, it is not different from falling on anything else with no assurance that it has finished falling or that it is falling still.

In a poetic shortcut, the poem shows that people interact with the world through language. Distinguishing things from the environment or isolating an event from a situation is possible (or at least, easier) because it is named (cf. a grain of sand, windowsill, falling). Linguistic “categories [including] number, gender, case, tense, mode, voice, ‘aspect,’ and a host of others ... are not so much discovered in experience as imposed upon it.” In Sapir’s words, we have to take note of “our unconscious projection of [the language’s] implicit expectations into the field of experience” (Sapir, 1931, p. 578). Every event, including those portrayed in poetry, must be captured with the use of grammatical categories inherent in a specific language. Speakers of Polish have to view it as either past (spadło ‘it fell’), present (spada ‘it is falling’) or future, as completed or continuing. They have to decide whether the agent or experiencer in that event is/was singular or plural, as well as whether his/her/its gender is masculine, feminine, or neuter. English speakers also have to choose between singularity and plurality and additionally between definiteness and indefiniteness; they also have to characterize the event temporally, by choosing one of the numerous constructions referring to the past, present, or future. The Kwakiutl from the Canadian British Columbia do not attend to the time of the event or the number of participants in it, but to whether it was, at the moment of utterance, visible to the speaker or not. Also, they necessarily specify who the event was closest to: the speaker, the hearer, or a third party. In the language of the Nootka, the Kwakiutl’s neighbors, the event described by Szymborska has to be verbalized in a totally different manner. The utterance will not contain a nominal element but a verbal construction, consisting of two major parts. The first expresses motion or location of a given class of objects (the object’s status is implied in this way), the other expresses the downward direction of the movement.

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Paradoxical phrasings from a later fragment of the poem – beneath a sky by nature skyless, the sun sets without setting at all, hides without hiding behind an unminding cloud – make the reader realize that language portrays the world not as it is but as it appears to people. After all, the sky does not exist: it is a virtual vault above the Earth, against which we see the Sun, the Moon, the stars, or sometimes the comets. By identifying portions of condensation of minute waterdrops, ice crystals, or their mixture, we also mentally “create” clouds.13 The changes in the position of the Sun, in turn, are described as if they were intentional: the Sun sets or hides behind something to avoid being seen. The poem’s ending even more explicitly points to the role of imagination in conceptualizing the world and the incommensurability of the world and language:

Mija jedna sekunda. Druga sekunda. Trzecia sekunda. Ale to tylko nasze trzy sekundy.

Czas przebiegł jak posłaniec z pilną wiadomością. Ale to tylko nasze porównanie. Zmyślona postać, wmówiony jej pośpiech, a wiadomość nieludzka.

A second passes. A second second. A third. But they’re three seconds only for us.

Time has passed like courier with urgent news. But that’s just our simile. The character is inverted, his haste is make believe, his news inhuman.

13 The attributive epithet relating to the cloud in the poem (bezwiedna, Eng. translation: unminding) is worthy of a separate comment. We are dealing here with a violation of the rules of lexico-semantic collocability, for bezwiedny means ‘occurring or made subconsciously, instinctive, automatic, unintentional, unwitting’ and is usually used to refer to actions, emotional reactions, people’s behavior etc., e.g. bezwiedny ruch ‘unintentional movement,’ bezwiedny uśmiech ‘unwitting smile,’ czuć bezwiedną niechęć/bezwiedne zaufanie ‘to feel an instinctive dislike/trust.’ Once these selectional restrictions are violated, the cloud has received a complex characterization: beside the standard meaning of bezwiedny, the older meaning of ‘ignorant, unknowing’ is activated.

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The manifold metaphorical and metonymic processes in this fragment play an important cognitive role: they are tools that facilitate at least a partial understanding of what cannot be otherwise understood at all because it is too complex or inaccessible to direct (sensory-motor) experience. The metaphorically structured concepts include time, measured with increasingly greater precision (cf. the names of the time units, a second being the smallest unit used in everyday situations). Time can be modeled in a variety of ways, among others as a mobile object, cf. the conventionalized metaphors time flies, time is running short, the time will come, it seemed like the time stopped, in the course of time, the passage of time, race against time, spend time.14 Time can also be personified, e.g. the spirit of the time(s), time is pressing, time heals all wounds (some of the expressions in the previous list can also be seen as personifications). Szymborska underscores the metaphorical nature of conventionalized ways of referring to time by using the stock expression a second passes as a poetic manifestation of the same conceptual metaphor TIME IS A MOVING OBJECT. What is more, she twice uses the expression ale to tylko nasze trzy sekundy ‘but they are three seconds only for us,’ ale to tylko nasze porównanie ‘but that’s just our simile.’ The possessive adjective nasze ‘our,’ corresponding to the personal pronoun my ‘we,’ preceded by a limiting particle tylko ‘only,’ the contrast-introducing conjunction ale ‘but’ – these all emphasize the opposition between the world and the way it is conceptualized by people, or in consequence: between the world and people. In this context, the final adjective in the poem receives special salience. Contrary to its word-formational structure, the word nieludzki does not only have a purely relational meaning ‘not concerned with or belonging to people,’ but two evaluative meanings ‘not befitting a person or interpersonal relationships; cruel, merciless’ and ‘not designed for a human being; beyond any person’s abilities or strength’ (the English counterpart used, inhuman, displays a similar range of meanings). This kind of semantic development of the word doubtless points to its anthropocentric orientation. The evaluative function of the word is also realized in the poetic context: the news acquires the property of being callous or insensitive. But because the adjective is used comparatively, it indirectly describes the working of time: both the evaluative and the structural meanings play a role here. Since it is, moreover, “just our simile,” it reveals our own human perspective for viewing and evaluation.

14 With very few differences, parallel metaphors can be found in Polish.

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6. A Final Word

The examples above hopefully show that for a reliable account of poetic creation and the individual worldview of an author, an analyst must consider – as one frame of reference apart from linguistic or literary conventions – the worldview entrenched in the language itself. However, the relationship between the linguistic worldview and literature is bidirectional. On the one hand, the worldview characteristic of a given speech community leaves its mark on literary texts, but on the other, the latter can also have a bearing on language-entrenched conceptualizations. Moreover, they can be useful in actual reconstructions of the linguistic worldview: they can facilitate verification procedures for hypotheses proposed on the basis of systemic data or by revealing aspects of language use that would remain otherwise unidentified. This question, however, merits a separate treatment.

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References

Borowski, Leon. (1820). Uwagi nad poezją i wymową pod względem ich podobieństwa i różnicy, z ćwiczeniami w niektórych gatunkach stylu. Wilno.

Brodziński, Kazimierz. (1964 [1818]). O klasyczności i romantyczności tudzież o duchu poezji polskiej. In Pisma estetyczno-krytyczne. Vol. 1. Wrocław: Ossolineum.

Brzozowska, Małgorzata. (1996). Kamień. In Słownik stereotypów i symboli ludowych. Vol. 1, 1. Ed. Jerzy Bartmiński & Stanisława Niebrzegowska. Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Chase, Stuart. (1956). Foreword. In Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality. Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, Ed. John B. Carroll (pp. v-x). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Christmann, Hans Helmut. (1967). Beiträge zur Geschichte der These vom Weltbild der Sprache. Wiesbaden: Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. (1886). Selections from Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics. Bernard Bosanquet & W. M. Bryant. The Journal of Speculative Philosophy. Quoted from www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ae [last accessed Feb 19, 2013]

Kopczyńska, Zdzisława. (1976). Język a poezja. Studia z dziejów świadomości językowej i literackiej oświecenia i romantyzmu. Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich.

Luther, Martin. (1530). Sendbrief vom Dollmetschen. [in English: An Open Letter on Translating. Transl. Gary Mann, revised and annotated by Michael D. Marlowe. 2003. www.bible-researcher.com/luther01.html; accessed Dec 7, 2012]

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Mukařovský, Jan. (1970). Wśród znaków i struktur. Wybór szkiców. Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy. [in English: 1978, Structure, Sign and Function – Selected Essays, New Haven: Yale University Press.]

Pajdzińska, Anna. (1999). Metafora pojęciowa w badaniach diachronicznych. In Anna Pajdzińska & Piotr Krzyżanowski (Eds.), Przeszłość w językowym obrazie świata (pp. 51-65). Lublin: Wydawnicwo UMCS.

Sapir, Edward. (1931). Conceptual categories in primitive languages. Science, 74, 578.

Sapir, Edward. (1961 [1929]). Status of linguistics as a science. In Edward Sapir, Culture, Language and Personality. Selected Essays (pp. 65-77). Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Scherer, Wilhelm. (1977 [1888]). Poetik. Ed. Günter Reiss. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

Skwarczyńska, Stefania. (Ed.). 1965. Teoria badań literackich za granicą. Antologia. Vol. 1, part 1. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie.

Szymborska, Wisława. (1977). Poezje. Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy.

Szymborska, Wisława. (1986). Ludzie na moście. Warszawa: Czytelnik.

Szymborska, Wisława. (2001). Poems New and Collected: 1957-1997. Translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Barańczak & Clare Cavanagh. Boston: Harcourt Trade Publishers.

Underhill, James W. (2009). Humboldt, Worldview and Language. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Underhill, James W. (2011). Creating Worldviews. Metaphor, Ideology and Language. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Whorf, Benjamin Lee. (1956 [1940]). Linguistics as an exact science. In Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality. Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, Ed. John B. Carroll (pp. 220-232). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Translated by Adam Głaz

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Chapter 3 The Linguistic Worldview and conceptual disintegration: Wisława Szymborska’s poem Identyfikacja and its English translation by Clare Cavanagh

Agnieszka Gicala Pedagogical University, Kraków, Poland

1. Introduction

The present chapter aims to apply the notion of the linguistic worldview of the Lublin School of Ethnolinguistics and Gilles Fauconnier’s theory of Mental Spaces, together with his view of discourse as a mental-space lattice, to an analysis of a text and its translation. The common denominator of all these concepts is the fact that they deal with human cognition, albeit from different angles, and that they involve the concept of viewpoint. I argue that these are complementary and that, as such, they can be successfully used to analyze and assess translation equivalence from a cognitive perspective. These tasks will be exemplified through analysis of a poem by the Polish Nobel Prize winner Wisława Szymborska (1923-2012) and its translation by Clare Cavanagh, the winner of the Found in Translation Award in 2011 for translating Szymborska’s volume Tutaj/Here (2009, in partial collaboration with Stanisław Barańczak). Szymborska often writes poems, like miniature pictures, that present unique descriptions of reality with a particular focus on details. It is through these details that Szymborska indirectly, and often ironically, expresses her view of the world. Her collection entitled Tutaj/Here (2009) contains a poem called Identyfikacja (Identification), in which the construction of the scene being presented is effected through unusual linguistic means. The disintegration of a person’s worldview following the tragic death of a beloved person is enacted through disintegration of language. I will argue that a given discourse, described by Fauconnier as a mental- space lattice constructed in relation to a particular viewpoint, may yield a specific linguistic worldview – and that a poem may be seen as a non-

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standard, poetic worldview resulting from a particular arrangement of mental spaces governed by an individual viewpoint. In other words, a non-standard worldview is the linguistic record (e.g. in the form of a poem) of a certain conceptualization, i.e. a scene as construed via linguistic means. In proposing this, I extend Jerzy Bartmiński’s (2009/2012) idea of linguistic worldview by elaborating on his concept of non-standard linguistic worldview, cf. section 2 below. The remaining part of this chapter is devoted to an analysis of translation. By comparing the determinants of the non-standard worldview evident in the original with the reconstruction of this worldview in translation, I will draw conclusions concerning the equivalence, or the degree of successful rendering, of these two worldviews. Moreover, I will attempt to formulate a more general judgment of the applicability of the idea of linguistic worldview to assessment of translation equivalence.

2. Methodology and definitions

The concept of the linguistic worldview is a major tenet of the Lublin School of Ethnolinguistics, whose main representative is Jerzy Bartmiński. Bartmiński defines the concept in the following way:

The “linguistic worldview” conception functions in two variants. These can be described in a somewhat simplistic manner as “subject related” and “object related” and assigned to the terms vision/view of the world and picture of the world (German das sprachliche Weltbilt), respectively. A vision is necessarily someone’s vision: it implies the act of looking and, by the same token, the existence of a perceiving subject. A picture, though also a result of someone’s perception of the world, does not imply the existence of the subject to the same extent: the focus is on the object, i.e. that which is contained in language itself. (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 76)

Since my analysis here concerns poetry, which is at core an individual, idiosyncratic vision of the world, Bartmiński’s above distinction between the two variants is crucial for my argument. I will therefore adopt Bartmiński’s understanding of the “linguistic worldview” as “subject-related,” sharing his belief in the significance of the conceptualizing and speaking subject. Bartmiński’s definition coincides with the dictionary meanings of the words vision and view, presented below on the basis of the Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture (2002) (cf. Tabakowska in this volume for a more detailed discussion):

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The meanings of vision encompass not only the physical ability to see but also a metaphorical extension of this ability to the domains of understanding and mental experience: “wise understanding of how the future will be; foresight” and “a picture seen in the mind; idea,” as well as the metaphysical domain: “something that is without bodily reality, seen (as if) in a dream, when in a sleeplike state, or as a religious experience.”

The noun view has a very large number of metaphorical meanings apart from the physical ability to see. Even this first meaning differs from that of vision in that it means seeing something “from a particular place.” The meaning that is the most interesting for the present considerations is “an act or manner of seeing, considering, examining, etc.” There are also several set phrases such as in view, in view of, or with a view to, all referring to intentional mental activity rather than a passive, physical act of seeing. For all of these reasons, the noun view seems to be the best term for describing a given interpretation of reality effected through specific linguistic means.

Bartmiński defines the linguistic worldview as “the interpretation of reality encoded in a given language, which can be captured in the form of judgements about the world. The judgements can be either entrenched in the language, its grammatical forms, lexicon and ‘frozen’ texts (e.g. proverbs) or implied by them” (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 76). The linguistic worldview is mostly social and cultural, and therefore visible chiefly in entrenched linguistic forms, such as proverbs or folk songs; it designates the portion of language that is shared by a community of speakers. However, “[t]he definition of linguistic worldview is not fully agreed on” (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 24); the scholar himself admits that, apart from “fossilized” forms, linguistic worldview can encompass what is dynamic in language:

My own definition of linguistic worldview as “a set of judgements” reveals its epistemological (interpretive) nature, does not limit it to what is “fossilized” or closed as a ‘structure”, makes room for the dynamic, open nature of the worldview, and does not favour abstract “regularity” in grammar and vocabulary. [...]

It [linguistic worldview – A.G.] is also differentiated in other styles derived from colloquial style: official, journalistic or the most individualised and creative literary style. (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 24) Given the fact that what is idiosyncratic in a text can only be perceived as such against the background of what is stereotyped in language, Bartmiński makes

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a distinction between the “standard linguistic worldview” and a “non-standard linguistic worldview.” He allows for interpretation of texts that make creative use of stereotypes by referring them to a non-standard linguistic worldview:

The existence of standard linguistic worldviews also implies the possibility of the existence of other worlds. [...] There are [...] texts that we want to regard as semantically coherent but that one should interpret by referring to a different, non-standard linguistic worldview. (Bartmiński, 2007, p. 70, trans. A.G.)

Bartmiński, however, only mentions this distinction once and in the work quoted above where he applies the concept to a Polish Christmas carol. He does not seem either to elaborate on it further or to clearly propose that texts may be treated as standard or non-standard linguistic worldviews. The distinction between stereotyped and non-standard worldviews remains in accordance with the cognitivist view of the scalar nature of cognitive and linguistic phenomena, which derives from an encyclopedic approach to semantics:

CL views “experience” as a continuum, where idiosyncratic individual experience is situated at one end of the scale, and universal (basic, mainly bodily) experience at the other, with culture-specific experiences of different types filling up the middle part. The scale corresponds to that of conventionalization in language: the closer to the “universal pole” a given concept is situated, the better chances it stands of finding its place within the conceptual system of a given language, i.e. of becoming a part of its conventional imagery. (Tabakowska, 1993, p. 128)

Given the scalar nature of language and the lack of clear-cut boundaries, linguistic worldview may encompass not only the most entrenched linguistic data but also those less established. It is thus important that the linguistic worldview is an interpretation rather than a reflection of the world (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, pp. 76, 77), i.e. linguistic expression depends on the creativity of speakers. Therefore, one is justified in including poetic vision in the scope of the term. I propose to extend the concept of non-standard linguistic worldview to embrace what is created by individual speakers, i.e. particular texts, including poetic ones. I believe that it is possible to talk about a text as a non-standard linguistic worldview or the non-standard linguistic worldview of a given author.1

1 A discussion of these issues can be found in Underhill 2011.

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The fact that within the term in question there is also room for poetry is also stressed by Bock (1992, p. 250), who points to convergences between the concept of worldview and language as brought out in the context of proposals within cognitive linguistics like Lakoff and Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory or Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar. To further support his view, Bock also quotes Friedrich’s statement about the poetic character of language:

For example, Friedrich (1986, p. 18) writes, “There is no meaning without the partly chaotic, imaginative individual”; however, the imagination is massively determined by the “poetic potential of language”. (Bock, 1992, p. 250)

Bock wrote the above contribution for the International Encyclopedia of Linguistics too early to include recent developments within cognitive linguistics such as Fauconnier’s (1994) mental spaces and Fauconnier and Turner’s (2002) theory of conceptual integration or blending, which is based on mental spaces.

Mental spaces are small conceptual packets constructed as we think and talk, for purposes of local understanding and action... Mental spaces are connected to long-term schematic knowledge called “frames” ... and to long-term specific knowledge... (Fauconnier & Turner 2002, p. 40)

Coulson, another scholar who has contributed to blending theory, provides a clear explanation of mental spaces and frames:

Mental spaces (Fauconnier, 1994) can be thought of as temporary containers for relevant information about a particular domain. A mental space contains a partial representation of the entities and relations of a particular scenario as construed by a speaker. Spaces are structured by elements which represent each of the discourse entities, and simple frames to represent the relationships that exist between them. Frames are hierarchically structured atttribute-value pairs that can either be integrated with perceptual information, or used to activate generic knowledge about people and objects assumed by default. (Coulson, n. d.)

According to Evans (2007, pp. 85-86), a frame is understood as a schematic conceptualization of knowledge or experience that is culturally or socially bound.

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Discourse is viewed by Fauconnier as “a mental-space lattice” and the development of discourse as the addition of new mental spaces to the lattice (cf. e.g. Evans, 2007; Fauconnier, 1997; Libura, 2010). In short, new mental spaces are signaled by the speaker and recognized by the listener or reader by so-called space builders, i.e. explicit mechanisms, such as time expressions, conjunctions, tenses, etc. The first space in a given discourse is called the base; it usually functions as the viewpoint for the next space or spaces, although the viewpoint may later shift to other spaces as well (the space that has the role of the viewpoint at a given stage of the discourse is called the viewpoint space). The notion of a mental-space lattice is invoked in the following section in an analysis of Wisława Szymborska’s poem Identyfikacja.

3. Wisława Szymborska’s Identyfikacja (Identification)

Stanisław Barańczak, one of the best-known translators of Wisława Szymborska’s poetry into English (he has transalted most of her poems in collaboration with Clare Cavanagh), perfectly captured the nature of her poems in the Afterword to the collection of Szymborska’s poetry entitled Nic dwa razy: wybór wierszy/ Nothing Twice: Selected Poems (1997):

The accessibility of Szymborska’s poetry stems from the fact that the “pressing questions” she keeps asking are, at least at first sight, as “naive” as those of the man in the street. The brilliance of her poetry lies in pushing the enquiry much farther than the man in the street ever would. Many of her poems start provocatively, with a question, observation or statement that seems downright trite, only to surprise us with its unexpected yet logical continuation. (Barańczak in Szymborska, 1997, p. 391)

These words are a reflection on the poem entitledNic dwa razy (Nothing Twice); however, Barańczak’s remarks may be understood to apply more generally when he writes that Szymborska “offer[s] a startling view of human existence” and “the meaning of human history – or perhaps the senslessness of it” (in Szymborska, 1997, p. 391). Identyfikacja/Identification is an account of a meeting between two women after the husband of one of them has died in a plane crash. As made clear by Szymborska herself, the poetic meeting is based on a real event:

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The description of at meeting has been waiting in my notebook for an equally long time [a few years].

Once, many years ago, I had the sad opportunity to see a person in trauma following the loss of someone close to her in a plane crash. It is only now that I have described that situation, changing the details a little... (Szymborska in Bikont & Szczęsna, 2012, p. 197; trans. A.G.)

The poem is written in the form of a monologue by the widow, which is addressed to her visitor and tells her about the plane crash. The woman is trying to argue that the body she had been asked to identify was not her husband’s and that he must be alive. A closer look at the argumentation’s clever logic reveals Szymborska’s unique gift of poetic understatement and seemingly unemotional observation of the world – the characteristics of her poetry that have won her international recognition. I believe that Fauconnier’s theory of Mental Spaces is an ideal tool to analyze and reveal the mechanisms of emotional and logical manipulation employed in this poem: they lead the reader to the emotional and startling discovery of the truth at its end – the truth that the reader is allowed to decipher via indirect linguistic hints. As has already been mentioned, Fauconnier views discourse as a network of interrrelated mental spaces, which he calls the mental-space lattice. The poem in question involves different mental spaces connected not only linearly (appearing as the monologue develops) but also reappearing in different perspectives. For the purpose of the present analysis, I would like to propose a division of the poem into various mental spaces where each space will receive the symbol “S” and a consecutive number: 1, 2, 3, etc. This part of the analysis deals with the poem in Polish; each quotation in Polish will be accompanied by the corresponding part of Cavanagh’s translation (in brackets) or, in some cases, by literal translation into English. I will proceed to an analysis of the translation in section 4. It is best, therefore, to juxtapose the original and the translation for ease of comparison:

Table 3.1 Szymborska’s Identyfikacja and its translation juxtaposed

mental space Identyfikacja Identification, trans. Clare Cavanagh no.

S1 Dobrze, że przyszłaś – mówi. It’s good you came – she says. Słyszałaś, że we czwartek rozbił się You heard a plane crashed on Thursday? samolot? S2 Well so they came to see me No więc właśnie w tej sprawie about it. przyjechali po mnie. S3 Podobno był na liście pasażerów. The story is he was on the passenger list. S4 No i co z tego, może się rozmyślił. So what, he might have changed his mind.

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continuedTable 3.1 Szymborska’s Identyfikacja and its translation juxtaposed

mental space Identyfikacja Identification, trans. Clare Cavanagh no.

They gave me some pills so I wouldn’t Potem mi pokazali kogoś, [S6: nie wiem fall apart. kogo.] Then they showed me [S6: I don’t know Cały czarny, spalony oprócz jednej ręki. S5 who.] Strzępek koszuli, zegarek, obrączka. All black, burned except one hand. Wpadłam w gniew, bo to na pewno nie A scrap of shirt, a watch, a wedding ring. on. I got furious, that can’t be him. S7 Nie zrobiłby mi tego, żeby tak wyglądać. He wouldn’t do that to me, look like that. A takich koszul pełno jest po sklepach. The stores are bursting with those shirts. A ten zegarek to zwykły zegarek. The watch is just a regular old watch. S8 A te nasze imiona na jego obrączce And our names on that ring, to są imiona bardzo pospolite. they’re only the most ordinary names. S1` Dobrze, że przyszłaś. It’s good you came. S9 Usiądź tu koło mnie. Sit here beside me. On rzeczywiście miał wrócić we He really was supposed to get back S10 czwartek. Thursday. Ale ile tych czwartków mamy jeszcze But we’ve got so many Thursdays left S11 w roku. this year. Zaraz nastawię czajnik na herbatę. I’ll put the kettle on for tea. S12 Umyję głowę, a potem, co potem, I’ll wash my hair, then what, spróbuję zbudzić się z tego wszystkiego. try to wake up from all this. S1`` Dobrze, że przyszłaś, It’s good you came, bo tam było zimno, since it was cold there a on tylko w tym takim gumowym and him in just some rubber sleeping S13 śpiworze, bag, on, to znaczy ten tamten nieszczęśliwy him, I mean, you know, that unlucky człowiek. man. I’ll put the Thursday on, wash the tea, S14 = Zaraz nastawię czwartek, umyję herbatę, since our names are completely S12` bo te nasze imiona przecież pospolite – ordinary –

The base space (S1) is established by the woman’s greeting: Dobrze, że przyszłaś (It’s good you came). The base space contains the following elements: the two friends, the present time, the meeting with its elements of socializing such as the casual tone of the conversation. This space has the epistemic status of a present fact. Next, the bereaved wife begins her account of the indentification of the body, and, as her story unfolds, it becomes obvious that this is not a straighforward report of the event. The second mental space (S2) reports the plane crash as a fact, thus establishing the topic to be developed in the next spaces: Słyszałaś, że we czwartek rozbił się samolot? (You heard a plane crashed on Thursday?). The fragment Podobno był ma liście pasażerów (The story is he was on the passenger list) is a new mental space (S3), starting with the space builder

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podobno (direct translation: supposedly; here translated as The story is), which signals its epistemic distance from the speaker and from the first space. This new space has the status of a hypothesis. Moreover, it is also distant in time (which is signaled by the use of the past tense) and in space (przyjechali po mnie – literally they came to fetch me). However, the next line (space S4) is a contradiction of the hypothesis that the husband died, introduced by the phrase No i co z tego (So what), denying the validity of the previous space and opening a different past possibility (cf. the word może in może się rozmyślił – he may have changed his mind). The use of może (may) gives this new space a modal character, i.e. the status of an opposing hypothesis. The next space (S5) is a factual report on the proceedings of identification of the body that was shown to the woman, and is interrupted with the negative nie wiem kogo (I don’t know who) (space S6). The list of details (shirt, watch, etc.) is followed by a counterfactual space S7, an emotional judgment on why the body was not her husband’s that derives from the married couple’s relationship (nie zrobiłby mi tego – he wouldn’t do that to me). S8 then contains a seemingly objective qualification of the shirt, watch, names on the wedding ring as very common, popular items. At this point, the monologue returns to the base space (S1): it is a repetition of Dobrze, że przyszłaś – It’s good you came. It develops into deontic space S9, the speaker’s wish for her friend to sit close (Usiądź tu koło mnie – Sit here beside me). Next, the same line of argumentation starts again: the speaker refers to a past fact only to deny its validity. The woman confirms the day of her husband’s arrival (czwartek – Thursday, which constitutes epistemic space S10), but then resorts to a rather unlikely argument that the man was not necessarily coming back last Thursday (S11, introduced by the space builder ale – but). The next space (S12) contains future constructions (I’ll); it refers to routine activities and contains the verb zbudzić się – wake up through which the tragedy is assessed as something unreal, something that did not happen. The monologue then returns to the base space S1 again. It is connected with the next space (S13, containing the past tense: tam było zimno – it was cold there) through the conjunction bo – since. The conjunction is normally used to express cause and effect so its use in S13 is illogical: there seems to be no direct relation between the other woman’s present visit and the cold during the identification a few days before or the fact that the body was placed only in a thin rubber bag. Then space S13 seems to continue the factual description of details during the identification. However, the use of the pronoun on – him and the reference to the rubber bag (a sleeping bag) betrays the fact that the woman did in fact recognize her husband. She tries to hide it by saying that it was just ten tamten nieszczęśliwy człowiek – that unlucky man. The last space in the poem, S14, established via the use of a future construction, refers again to the same routine activities as in S12 but here the woman confuses them:

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wrong collocations (nastawię czwartek, umyję herbatę – put the Thursday on, wash the tea) and a wrong cause-effect relation while pointing to the names on the wedding ring. Therefore, S14 may also be treated as S12`. Let us now concentrate on those elements of the poem that build and reinforce its final effect. Its poetic power lies in the woman’s apparently unemotional attempts to deny her husband’s death. The failure of her attempts to not break down psychologically is conveyed through linguistic means: the breakdown is merely suggested, expressed indirectly. However, the choice of linguistic measures used for this purpose is guided by metalinguistic factors: the viewpoint and the viewpoint mental space. It is the viewpoint that determines what kind of linguistic worldview the discourse reveals. According to Libura (2010, p. 27), when discourse begins, it is the base space that constitutes the viewpoint, thus allowing for the appearance of the next space. In Szymborska’s poem, the base (S1) is the beginning of the monologue (followed by an establishment of its topic in S2). It constitutes the viewpoint for most other spaces in that the woman tells her friend about what happened from her present perspective: the conversation takes place a few days after the crash, she is at home, busy with her guest and with daily routines. Let us look closer at the linguistic markers of this viewpoint in the whole mental-space lattice. First, the viewpoint marker podobno (the story is), which expresses the woman’s disbelief in and distance from the tragedy, shows that mental space S3 is built from the viewpoint of S1. Another tool of this kind (in S5 and S6) is the speaker’s reference to the dead husband as if it was not him but an unknown person: Potem mi pokazali kogoś, nie wiem kogo (lit. Then they showed me someone, I don’t know who) and ten tamten nieszczęśliwy człowiek in S12 (lit. this that unlucky man). Moreover, her use of repetition in these places (kogoś, nie wiem kogo and ten tamten) seems to have an iconic function: the more words, the larger her distance from the tragedy which, as she wants to prove, does not concern her personally. Third, some spaces are introduced as contradictions of certain past facts. Space S4 starts with the marker No i co z tego (So what); S8 with its viewpoint marker, the conjunction a (translatable here as because or after all), repeated three times for greater emphasis; S11 is introduced by the conjunction ale (but) and its content is reinforced by its form as a rhetorical question. The viewpoint of a woman whom the plane crash apparently does not concern (let us mark it as VP1) is, however, not the only one in the poem. Skillfully “smuggled” into that scene is the viewpoint of a woman who knows that the body that she has been asked to identify was her husband’s (VP2). This contrasting viewpoint guides a different interpretation of certain of the poem’s mental spaces. Juxtaposed and intertwined with VP1, VP2 creates a linguistic picture (an idiosyncratic worldview) of a woman whose world is disintegrating despite her attempts to deny it to herself and to her visitor. VP2 does not seem to arise from one particular mental space, since, as was shown above, the whole

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mental-space lattice appears to be a logical arrangement of arguments that deny the tragedy. Yet the title of the poem, Identyfikacja (Identification), prompts a double interpretation (either the formal procedure performed in such cases or the actual act of recognizing the victim), and this is how VP2 clandestinely finds its way into the scene. Following other scholars, Bartmiński (2009, pp. 212ff) notes that because the title always precedes the text, it plays a strategic role in relation to the text, names it and guides the reader’s expectations concerning the content to be read. The titles of literary texts are of special importance as they prompt the interpretation of the texts that they announce (Bartmiński, 2009, p. 216). In Szymborska’s Identyfikacja, the fact that the woman does know that her husband is dead is manifested in mental space S8, through the use of the possessive adjective nasze (our) in A te nasze imiona na jego obrączce (And our names on that ring). Her awareness of the fact is also betrayed by her confusion when she uses the personal pronoun on (him) in S13 and quickly explains that she only meant that unlucky man. What is more, her counterarguments in S7 and S11 are simply ridiculous in the context. The fact that she is losing ground when trying to be reasonable is shown by repetition in mental space S11: a potem, co potem (lit. and then, then what) articulates her struggle to gather her thoughts. Finally, at the end of the poem (in S14), the mistakes that she makes in the two collocations combined with illogical reasoning in the last line result in a nonsensical disintegration of linguistic meaning. This signals disintegration on the mental and existential levels. To sum up, the poem may be seen as a mental-space lattice strung between two opposing viewpoints. As such, the poem presents the linguistic view of a world that is falling apart along with the speaker’s common sense, logical thinking and language – a non-standard worldview built by carefully chosen linguistic means.

4. Analysis of the translation

The concept of the standard vs. non-standard linguistic worldview, as contained in a given language or in a given text (cf. Section 2 for a discussion of this distinction), can be used as a tool to investigate translations (cf. Danaher in this volume). Translation equivalence is founded on the concept of the linguistic worldview in that to translate means to reconstruct the non-standard linguistic worldview of the original. This approach allows for embracing the various linguistic means relevant to the assessment of a translation. In my analysis of Cavanagh’s rendering of Szymborska’s poem, I will trace the markers of the speaker’s linguistic worldview, comparing those used in the translation with those in the original.

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Cavanagh is an expert on Szymborska’s poetry and on modern Polish poetry in general. Over a period of more than twenty years, she has translated, together with Stanisław Barańczak, most of the former; she has also translated Szymborska’s prose. Cavanagh has also rendered into English the poetry of another Polish Nobel laureate, Czesław Miłosz, as well as works by Adam Zagajewski, a modern Polish poet who has been mentioned as the a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Cavanagh was also Szymborska’s friend. In an interview at a poetry evening in Chicago organized to commemorate Szymborska’s poetry following her death, Cavanagh said:

Szymborska is absolutely unpretentious. Her poetry is a universal view of the world, but also a very precise one, a balance between precision and accessibility... (http://kultura.onet.pl/literatura/usa-pozegnaly-szymborska,1,5025176,artykul.html; last accessed Feb 19, 2013, trans. A.G.)

Clare Cavanagh’s translation is very exact, almost word for word, which is what the poem demands of its translator due to the simplicity of its language. The English rendering does, therefore, retain most of the elements that convey the original linguistic worldview. For example, in mental space S2 Podobno is translated as The story is, both of which distance the speaker from the event she is talking about. Indeed, certain grammatical properties of the English language even strengthen the effect in question, i.e. the woman’s apparent denial of the tragedy. In the translation, the woman’s point of view becomes enhanced by the use of the indefinite article in spaces S2 (a plane crashed on Thursday) and S5 (a scrap of shirt, a watch, a wedding ring). In S2, the indefinite article stresses the fact that the woman seemingly does not attach much importance to the plane crash as if it did not concern her; in S5 the indefinite article qualifies the objects mentioned as unknown: the woman apparently does not recognize them as her husband’s. However, the translation also reveals some subtle divergences from the VP1 as constructed in the original. It does not contain the repetition in mental spaces S5 and S6 that proves to be iconically important. The fragment Potem mi pokazali kogoś, nie wiem kogo (lit. Then they showed me someone, I don’t know who) is rendered more fluently as Then they showed me I don’t know who. A similar loss occurs in mental space S12, where the phrase ten tamten nieszczęśliwy człowiek (lit. this that unlucky man) is translated more smoothly as that unlucky man. Moreover, the Polish conjunction a, repeated three times in S8, is not rendered at all, as a result of which the desperately argumentative character of the woman’s words in this mental space becomes less felt. The rhetorical question in S11 is translated as a statement, which weakens the effect.

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The opposing VP2, i.e. that of the woman who admits that the tragedy does concern her, becomes blurred in three places in the translation. One instance can be found in S8, where the original viewpoint marker (the possessive adjective jego in jego obrączce ‘his wedding ring,’ which may indicate the husband) is rendered as the demonstrative adjective that, which points to the ring itself rather than to its owner. Secondly, repetition, and hence the effect of the woman’s effort to gather her thoughts, becomes lost in mental space S11: a potem, co potem is shortened to then what. The last, crucial instance comes in the final line where the “disintegrated” collocations find their absolutely illogical justification:bo te nasze imiona przecież pospolite – translated as since our names are completely ordinary. The key word, apart from the conjunction bo (since), is przecież, which implies that what is said is an argument against an earlier view or an explanation of something that should be obvious. The translation renders przecież as completely, and thus weakens the argumentative force here.

5. Conclusions

While the English version of Szymborska’s poem Identyfikacja has the advantage of stressing the woman’s reasonable viewpoint (VP1) by using linguistic means unavailable in Polish, it also somewhat weakens her other, more dramatic viewpoint (VP2). In the translation, the woman’s judgments, the proportions of the reasonable and the tragic elements of her view of reality as expressed in the monologue, shift slightly away from the dramatic. In English, linguistic means that prove more fluent, less stammering, and less argumentative create a linguistic worldview that is less overtly tragic and reveals subtler signs of disintegration. As a general conclusion, it is worth recalling Bartmiński’s definition of the linguistic worldview as “the interpretation of reality encoded in a given language, which can be captured in the form of judgments about the world” (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 76) as well as the distinction he makes between the standard and the non-standard linguistic worldview. The extension of the latter proposed here allows treatment of a poetic text as a non-standard linguistic worldview. A comparison of non-standard linguistic worldviews in the Polish original and the English translation, coupled with an examination of the linguistic markers of the two clashing viewpoints (VP1 and VP2) intertwined in the mental-space lattice that constitutes the woman’s monologue, allow for an assessment of translation equivalence.

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References

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (2007). Językowe podstawy obrazu świata. Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (2009). Tekstologia. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (2009/2012). Aspects of Cognitive Ethnolinguistics. Ed. Jörg Zinken. Shefflied and Oakville, CT: Equinox.

Bikont, Anna, & Szczęsna, Joanna. (2012). Pamiątkowe rupiecie. Biografia Wisławy Szymborskiej. Kraków: Znak.

Bock, Philip K. (1992). World wiew and language. In International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, Ed. W. Bright (pp. 248-251). Oxford University Press.

Coulson, Seana. (n.d.). What’s so funny?: Conceptual integration in humorous examples. http://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/~coulson/funstuff/funny.html; accessed May 8, 2012

Evans, Vyvyan. (2007). A Glossary of Cognitive Linguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Fauconnier, Gilles. (1994). Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Fauconnier, Gilles. (1997). Mappings in Thought and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fauconnier, Gilles, & Turner, Mark. (2002). The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books.

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Friedrich, Paul. (1986). The Language Parallax: Linguistic Parallellism and Poetic Indeterminacy. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Libura, Agnieszka. (2010). Teoria przestrzeni mentalnych i integracji pojęciowej. Struktura modelu i jego funkcjonalność. Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego.

Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture. (2002). Ed. Della Summers. Harlow: Longman.

Szymborska, Wisława. (2007). Nic dwa razy: wybór wierszy/Nothing Twice: Selected Poems. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie.

Szymborska, Wisława. (2009). Tutaj/Here. Kraków: Znak.

Tabakowska, Elżbieta (1993). Cognitive Linguistics and Poetics of Translation. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag.

Underhill, James W. (2011). Creating Worldviews: Metaphor, Ideology and Language. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Chapter 4 What words tell us: phenomenology, cognitive ethnolinguistics, and poetry1

Irena Vaňková Charles University, Prague, The Czech Republic

1. The Natural World and its linguistic Image: “Body, Community, Language, World”

The ground of our human relationship to reality is, from the perspective of phenomenology, the natural world (Patočka, 1992 [1936]). This philosophical point of departure is in obvious agreement with the concept of the linguistic worldview from Polish cognitive ethnolinguistics (Bartmiński, 2009/2012) as well as with the naive worldview from Russian linguistics (Apresyan, 1995). A correlate of Patočka’s natural world is a semantic structure that represents the linguistic worldview in its foundational situation: language having a commonplace connection to reality and language used in everyday, subjectively grounded communication (cf. styl potoczny ‘colloquial style’ as described in Bartmiński, 2001). This type of language is usually opposed to scientific language. Scientific language is marked for objectivity and abstraction, a correlation with intellectual reflection rather than experience, and also the use of terms that are, in contrast with “everyday words,” technically precise and devoid of connotation. The language of science corresponds with a “theoretical world” that obviously represents a non-primary or secondary way of relating to our reality. Objectivizing abstraction removes from things their fundamental human meaningfulness – the very ways in which they figure in our lives and thereby co-create the natural world in which we live.2 In this regard, it is instructive to consider the dictionary definitions of a number of Czech words: slza ‘tear’ is defined as a ‘secretion of the ocular glands,’ vráska ‘wrinkle’ as a ‘line in the skin caused by shrinkage,’ džbán ‘jug’ as an

1 For his encouragement, valued suggestions, and translating patience, the author extends her thanks to David Danaher. 2 Cf. Bartmiński this volume.

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‘oblong, convex container with a handle,’ sestra ‘sister’ as a ‘female sibling.’ True: as many cognitively-oriented linguists have been noting for over thirty years, even traditional linguistics (in this case, lexicography) is not often willing to take into account the basic, pre-reflective horizon of our natural world. Language is unrivalled as form of testimony to our experience of the natural world. What is it that we signify by the words tear, wrinkle, jug, sister? What do these phenomena represent for a human being, and what do they mean to us in the context of a specific language, culture, or human community? The phenomenological argument in favor of a “return to things” can be understood as a challenge similar to the one issued by proponents of cognitive linguistics and ethnolinguistics – in the sense both of a turning away from impersonal theoretical constructions and moving back to reflecting on the primary and natural human relationship to the world, as well as of profiling the ways in which human conceptualizing and understanding (and pre- understanding) are manifested in the context of a cultural community. With differences in emphasis, this approach has been advocated by, among many others, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980), Anna Wierzbicka (1996), and Jerzy Bartmiński (2009/2012). All of these scholars stress the primacy of human experience in its relational or relative aspects: in relation to either a general human (anthropocentric) perspective or the perspective of one linguistically and culturally bound ethnos. We investigate, then, both how people actually are and also how things are “manifested” (as a philosopher might say) to us as human beings and as speakers of a given language. According to phenomenologists, this process takes places through the mediation of our body and senses, as a result of our relationships with other people (in a “community”), and naturally also through language; to this can be added that it takes place also through our continual contact with the whole of the world, which serves as our absolute or ultimate horizon. Jan Patočka wrote that we are anchored in existence in just these four ways: through “body, community, language, world” (Patočka, 1995). Cognitive linguistics, although it draws from other sources and is associated with other contexts, is nonetheless aware, in one way or another, of this phenomenological truth, which means that when we investigate the semantic structures of language with cognitive and ethnolinguistic tools, we are also contributing, as linguists, to phenomenological discovery of the natural world.

2. Things

Things “enter into obviousness,” and therefore they are. To be means to be manifested. We comprehend things through our senses (and not merely through our sense of sight, even though sight is probably the most prominent and

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prototypical of human senses). In a poem entitled The Pink Shrub by the Austrian poet Karel Lubomirski, we read (Lubomirski, 2003, p. 141):

You smell nice Voníš as if you knew jako bys veděl about the blind. o slepých.

Smell is also one of the ways that things manifest themselves to us. In another poem, the same Austrian poet asks (Lubomirski, 2003, p. 99):

Is beauty Je krása the love of things? láskou věcí?

From ancient times, beauty has tended to be associated with liking by means of sensory experiences: the name for the “study of beauty,” aesthetics, derives from the Greek expression aisthétikós ‘that which is perceivable.’ According to Eugen Fink, our relationship to things in the world is dependent upon the ways in which those things meet us (Fink, 1996 [1958], p. 118), and precisely this is the ground of intentionality. The fact that things are sensually perceivable allows us, who are sense-equipped, to also meet them halfway. Perception is, as a result, a two-way relationship between perceiver and perceived, and things exist only in their relation to us.

Things Věci

I adore things, reticent companions, Miluji věci, mlčenlivé soudruhy, because everyone treats them protože všichni nakládají s nimi, as if they are not alive jako by nežily, and meanwhile they live and look at us a ony zatím žijí a dívají se na nás like loyal dogs with focused faces jako věrní psi pohledy soustředěnými and put up with the fact that a trpí, no one talks to them. že žádný člověk k nim nepromluví. They are embarrassed to speak first, Ostýchají se první dát do řeči, they are silent, wait, and are silent still mlčí, čekají, mlčí, and yet a přeci they would so much like to chat a bit! Tolik by chtěly to trochu si porozprávět!

Which is why I adore things Proto miluji věci and the whole world. a také miluji celý svět. (Wolker, 1958)

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In this poet’s (somewhat child-like) anthropomorphization, things are analogized to living creatives that have feelings (of embarrassment) and loyalties (like dogs). Things merely await a friendly gesture from us that would bring them into our world to begin a dialogue and relationship with us. Wolker’s things are “embarrassed to speak first,” and they have to wait to be offered our attention and given permission by us to communicate. As we have seen, however, the phenomenological perspective suggests an entirely different relationship between things and people. Contrary to Wolker, things do speak first to the extent that they manifest themselves to us and, in doing so, offer their existence to our disposal. To be therefore means both to be perceivable and to be perceived. There is an essential difference between a thing in the world and an object (of scientific investigation). To science – which is objectivizing, generalizing, and reductive – a jug, for example, is something entirely different than what it is for us given the horizon of the natural world. The primary and original human experience of the world is thus one of subjectivity, and as has been said, the ground for our experience of reality is the natural world. Objectivity (as the ontological point of departure for science) is bound up with a derived world that is artificially created and therefore “un-natural.” Says Neubauer:

An entity in an objective sense is the exact opposite of an entity that we relate to in the context of the natural world. Human experience in the natural world foregrounds the particular and lively activity of things, their self-transcendent openness, and their welcoming, partnerly relationality to other things. (Neubauer, 2001,p. 22)

Heidegger writes that science destroyed things as such and has thereby forced us to distance ourselves from the jug filled with wine and put in its place a hollow space used to hold fluid matter (1993, p. 15).3 Phenomenologists urge a return to the roots of things, that is, to our experience of them. We need to remember how a given thing manifests itself to us in its materiality or its thing-ness. Objects are “indifferent,” and objects come into being through the reduction of things: we abstract away from those very qualities that constitute the essence of them. When we incorporate them into a scientific framework, we

render them descriptively exact, measurable. We designate water as H2O, and in doing so water loses its original nature. Or we derive the characteristics of water from its categorial association with “fluid matter.” But when we need to

3 This study references a Czech-German collection of Heidegger’s late essays (Heidegger 1993), and we are concerned primarily with two of them, both from 1950: “Das Ding” (“Věc”) and “Die Sprache” (“Řeč”).

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put out a fire, we will not be looking for either H2O or the abstraction that is fluid matter. The thing-ness of a thing (how water differs from the abstraction that is fluid matter) carries over also to the word that names it. A word is correlative with the thing it names, and at the same time it has the ability, through connotation, to evoke it, to call it to mind. This is true even more so when we share the word with others, given that language belongs not to “me” but rather to “us” (Gadamer, 1999, p. 27).

3. Things and words

According to Jungmann’s dictionary (SČN, 1989 [1835-1839]), a thing is anything that can be uttered, called, and named. The fact that a thing is bound up with discourse is also supported, in the same semantic explanation, by an etymological reference: Czech věc ‘thing’ is connected up with the base vět- (cf. odvětit ‘to reply to,’ věta ‘sentence,’ závěť ‘last will and testament’); similar correspondences in other languages are also mentioned: German Sache and sagen, Latin res and reo, and also Polish rzecz in the meaning of Czech věc. Even, then, in language itself we see evidence for the philosophical stance that there is, in the relationship between thing and word, a double horizon of world and language. In the words of Zdeněk Kratochvíl, the word in speech and the thing in the world correspond to each other (1994, p. 50). Further on in his discussion, and in regard to the medieval philosophical dispute about whether Adam has a belly-button given that he was not born like other people, Kratochvíl writes:

Every thing carries with it traces of its naturalness, its origin, its situatedness. Put figuratively, every thing “has a belly-button”… Every thing always has its “belly-button” or something analogically similar; something that points not only to its inception in the sense of its generative emergence, but also to the manner in which this thing is separated off from the background of all Being, a kind of constitutive contrast in relation to its bedrock or surroundings. (Kratochvíl, 1994, p. 44)

It can be added that we could consider every word associated with a thing also to be its “belly-button.” We have “separated off from the background of all Being” the concept as logos, and the thing begins to exist in a human context thanks to its being a word-concept. The word itself then testifies to this in that it also can serve as a trace in a search for a thing’s “naturalness, origin, and situatedness.” (By “thing” is not of course meant only something

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concrete, nor is it intended to be understood exclusively as some kind of substance, even if the prototypical examples might lead us to think so.) We might pause for a moment to consider, in this connection, the motivation behind a linguistic concept. Words are traditionally divided into those that are motivated and those that are not, and this is done in accordance with whether or not we can find indications of lexical meaning in their word-formational structures. For example, the Czech adjective kaštanový ‘auburn,’ which designates a shade of hair-color that is reminiscent of the color of the nuts of the chestnut tree (kaštan in Czech), is motivationally transparent; the same is true for the shade of green in the adjective lahvový, which is unproblematically relatable to láhev ‘bottle.’ On the other hand, the adjective červený, which is for the color red, appears unmotivated to most native speakers, and when they learn that it is derived from the noun červ ‘worm,’ most people are surprised. When, however, they come to learn that our ancestors used worms as raw material to make colored dyes, then – presto! – the word becomes a belly-button of the thing: červený originally meant ‘colored by červ.’ In acquiring a language, children find it difficult to understand unmotivated words, and this difficulty is easy to spot. A little Czech girl might speak o kocouru Vbotáchovi ‘about the cat in the shoes’ because she grammatically declines the phrase v botách ‘in the shoes,’ adding the -ovi ending for an animate masculine singular noun in the locative case, as if it were the proper name of a tomcat from a fairy-tale (i.e., “Puss Intheboots”). Wax crayons (Czech voskovky, from voska, the word for wax) become for her oskovky – because she is trying to speak “correctly” and she thinks that the initial v- is an artifact of colloquial Czech (cf. colloquial Czech vokno ‘window’ in place of literary Czech okno). She does not understand the connections between words because, at least for the moment, she understands the world also only in a partial way. Only with time will she begin to be able to mutually interrelate her world experience with language, and it will become gradually clear to her why one thing is said and not another and what words are connected to. Understanding the world goes hand-in-hand with understanding language. It is also true that when we study a foreign language, words remain for us – for a long time and sometimes forever – mostly unmotivated. They only serve to denote certain strips of reality. Even if we can communicate well in another language – we can “get by” and understand public signs, read menus, and perhaps even comprehend sophisticated texts in our fields – this does not mean that we understand the internal semantic threads running through the language, that we feel in and beyond that language the existence of a coherent world that holds together thousands of such interconnected phenomena. Our maternal or native language is a different matter altogether. In our native language, the correlate of a word is not a concept, but rather experience itself

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(Neubauer, 1999, p. 88). One aspect of this is perhaps a sensitivity to motivation, which is, starting in childhood, built from the experiential connection between words and their “maternal” reality. Another aspect is our spontaneous ability to understand connotations and allusions that are bound up with words and their associated collocations: our linguistic (sub)consciousness is prepared to react authentically to fine-grained and nuanced semantic distinctions between words as well as to all kinds of wordplay. It is precisely in relation to our native language that we truly experience the natural world. It would be naive to suppose that understanding in and of one’s native language is definitively fixed once and for all. We know from experience that this is not true. We are often – even in adulthood – taken aback by what words or phrases that we had thought we knew actually do mean. For example, while the Czech word hudba ‘music’ is understood as unmotivated, it takes only the sudden realization that it is related to hudení ‘violin-playing,’ which is derived from the verb housti ‘to play the violin,’ to see that hudba is also undoubtedly related to housle ‘the violin as an instrument.’ It is in this way that we begin to understand words against the background of further horizons. In this regard, it is possible to understand how a thing is rendered more material (more “thing-y”) through the prism of the word that denotes it. Closely connected with word motivation, which we have already discussed, is a word’s conceptual construction, which tends to be different in different languages. The Czech word zelenina contains a reference to the color green (zelená barva) of some (parts of) vegetables, and in this form of reference the Czech word, compared with words in other languages for the same thing, is rather specific. The English word vegetables refers to plant growth, and Polish warzywo to cooking. Polish does also have the word zielenina, but it refers, in contrast to the similar Czech term, only to the fresh tops of the vegetables, the parts actually used in the kitchen (that is, the part of Czech zelenina that is really green or zelený). We should be reminded here of Heidegger (1993), who said that naming is a kind of calling out, and calling out brings closer to us the existence of that which had previously not been called. It is this very calling out of something, or calling to something, that represents an evocation of the thing being called. A thing is thus not only designated or denoted by its word, it is also evoked by it. Our discussion has brought us back to phenomenology: a phenomenon is that which appears or reveals itself, and logos is sense-making discourse. Our discussion is then aimed at those things that are apparently obvious and evident, things that no one really looks at or asks about precisely because of the “obviousness” of superficial seeing and understanding. Our task is to discover – through language! – “something that was already here, something that we felt, something that we somehow saw out of the corner of our eye but that we did not

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quite catch, something ‘that has not yet been given conceptual form’” (Patočka, 1995, p. 11).

4. The Thing Called Džbán ‘Jug’ and the word džbán

Once again the question of the relationship between thing and word arises: this time, however, more specifically – between the thing called džbán ‘jug’ and the word džbán. Let us consider again a child’s perspective. The world appears richer in meanings to children than it does to adults: children do not yet have extensive experience of life and they direct considerably more attention to the “obvious.” A child’s world is a natural world – a primary, pre-reflective world. The following poem in prose, entitled The Jug, credibly stylizes a child’s perspective; in its formal contours it likewise represents a so-called “poetic definition,” which offers up for our consideration a concrete conceptual explication:

The jug is a big glass bird with a bulbous belly. It has a beak and an enormous ear. It floats in a well and it sinks. I have to immerse my hand deep under the water to pull it out. I scoop up water and the jug breaks out in sweat. The water is so heavy. And so cold. My hands, in which I am clutching it, get suddenly bigger. When I put the jug down on the ground, my hands are little again. It’s too bad that one day the jug will break! (Nezval, 1956, p. 12)

A small child has no need to generalize by searching out a superordinate concept that could be used to categorize the jug. From the perspective of the materiality of the jug (its “thing-ness” or “jug-ness”), superordination is, after all, hardly essential. A linguistic dictionary, in contrast, offers an Aristotelian definition of the word džbán jug as a “convex, oblong container with a handle” (SSČ, 1994): the dictionary generalizes, it uses as its starting point the general concept of “container,” and then looks for additional specifying semantic features (‘convex,’ ‘with a handle’). The child, of course, is thinking of a specific jug and sees it as a profiled participant in a familiar setting and action – as an object that is part of an interesting experience, which is about getting water from a well. The child’s account is full of important sensory references: a poetic description of the jug’s appearance, the intense experience of dipping the jug into the well and the weight and coldness of the scooped up water. We also find here child-like wonder in the form of an optical illusion, and finally an awareness that one

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day the glass jug will break. These details represent the basic elements of the child’s experience with the jug: a summary of how the jug-as-thing looks (how it manifests itself and comes across to the child), what it is used for, the context in which we encounter it, the place it occupies in our world. The word džbán evokes an encounter with a real jug by, in Heidegger’s words, calling it out so that it emerges from unbeing into being. If we want to capture the meaning of the word džbán, then we cannot reduce it to a definition consisting of a superordinate concept along with a few differentiating features. That kind of definition is precisely what Heidegger warns us against: it distances us from the jug filled with wine (or cold water from the well) and replaces it with an abstracted container, the interior space of which is used to hold fluid matter. Thanks to the word (the verbal sign), a thing is “evoked.” The nature of meaning thus conceived points to the unity of cognition and language, to the essential role played by bodily and sensory experience in conceptual formation, to the naturalness of metaphoric and metonymic conceptualization, and also to the “narrativity” of meaning as well as the fact that human thinking is, when all is said and done, “literary” (Turner, 1996). Things have a deep involvement in stories, scripts, and narrative structures.4

5. A Truly Stony Stone, or Why Linguists Should Study Poetry

According to Heidegger, language speaks – that is, words speak. If human beings also speak, we do so only secondarily in answer to the speech of speech – and thanks to the fact that we have listened intently to what words have had to say. Heidegger often added to this that the heart of “speaking speech” – the essence of what words communicate – is revealed most authentically in poetry. Victor Shklovsky argued that art exists in order to give back to us the ability to experience life, to make us once again able to truly perceive things: to make the stone stony (see Mukařovský, 1971). What makes the stone stony? The “stony- ness of the stone” is evidently a matter of the semantic connotations that are bound up with the linguistic utterance. The word stone does not simply designate

4 In the Czech linguistic worldview, džbán is involved in narrative structures through its use in phraseology (including proverbs), collocational phrasings, etc. It is, in this way, symbolically and expressively anchored in Czech culture broadly understood (see Vaňková, 2004). It is interesting to note that one of the expressive features most strongly associated with džbán is its breakability.

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a piece of rock: it does not function merely to denote the thing. According to Heidegger, the word serves to call the thing out from a state of unpresent non- existence to a state of present existence, and this occurs in all of its associated sensory and contextual richness. In the Czech linguistic worldview, and undoubtedly in many other linguistic worldviews as well, a stone is associated with the image of something hard, sharp, immobile, heavy, and cold; a stone is, from a human perspective, a tool, and usually a tool used to injure or do harm. These characteristics of a stone can be (at least in Czech) backed up with connotational evidence, and we have found linguistically systemic data that verifies them (cf. Bartmiński & Panasiuk, 2001): consider, for example, the derivational adjective kamenný ‘stony’ that occurs in collocations like kamenná tvář ‘stone face’ and kamenné srdce ‘stony heart’ (in the sense of ‘hard heart’) and that confirms the connotations of immobility, if not also insensitivity; one verbal derivation kamenovat ‘to stone’ with its connotations of harm, sanction, enmity, unfriendliness; another verbal derivation zkamenět ‘to turn to stone’ with connotations of stiffness that are associated with a strongly felt experience of fear or fright. Verificational evidence is also found in phraseological expressions: spadl mi kámen ze srdce ‘a stone [weight] fell from my heart’ and odvalit někomu z cesty každý kámen ‘to roll away every stone from someone’s path’ in the sense of ‘paving the way for someone.’ Also, of course, in phraseological analogies: být chladný/studený jako kámen ‘to be cold as stone,’ být tvrdý jako kámen ‘to be hard as a rock,’ být těžký jako kámen ‘to be heavy as a stone,’ jít ke dnu jako kámen ‘to drop [to the bottom] like a rock.’ In addition to these “strong” systemic connotations, there are also so-called “weak” connotations that are not confirmed in the language system as a whole but can be conveyed – and understood – textually. We encounter these most often in poetry or in creative texts of all kinds, and usually in contexts that substantiate their communicativity (Pajdzińska & Tokarski, 2010; Tokarski, 2007). The word kámen ‘stone’ appears in poetic texts as a prototypically concrete object, as a basic element found in the world, but also sometimes as an entity endowed with a certain sensitivity to the world or its own inner life that people cannot comprehend. A stone (kámen) can even have its own language and spirituality: Vladimír Holan once wrote a poem called Modlitwa kamene (“The Stone’s Prayer”) that is written entirely in “stone language.”5 These kinds of cases represent implicit polemics with the stone‘s linguistically systemic connotations of inanimacy and insensitivity (cf. Vaňková, 2010). In a similar way, the poet Jan

5 Cf. Pajdzińska this volume for Wisława Szymborska’s poetic elaboration of the characteristics of the stone in Polish linguistic worldview. Special attention is paid to the way the poet contradicts the stone’s feature of ‘muteness.’

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Skácel “questions” connotations associated with kámen in this quatrain:

and you who don’t wish to cast stones a ty jenž necheš kamenovat be like a stone in your heart buď jako kámen v srdci svém so merciful no stone has yet tak milosrdný ještě nikdy cast the first stone nehodil kámen kámenem

(Skácel, 1996, p. 154)

In Skácel‘s polemic with our stereotypical understanding of kámen, he introduces a paradoxical explanation of a stone’s “mercifulness” (milosrdnost), and it becomes a mercifulness that we should take as a model if we ourselves truly do not want to “cast the first stone.” The two sides of this evocative attitude – on the one side the stone’s emotional hardness (mít srdce jako kámen ‘to have the heart of a stone’) and on the other the potential desire to “cast the first stone” (kamenovat), a Biblical activity associated with judgment and punishment – blend surprisingly together in this verse. Whoever is actually “like a stone” (jako kámen) is the very opposite of callous because stones do no harm. Heidegger said that poetry is discourse in its pure form and that poetry conveys most clearly the essence of speech or what speech conveys (Heidegger, 1993). This is obviously similar to the idea encountered in cognitive semantics in connection with the study of meaning potential. Ryszard Tokarski paraphrases Anna Wierzbicka in asserting that it is important not “what an expression means” but rather “what an expression could mean” (Tokarski, 2007), and he then explains why it is important that linguists examine poetic texts. We should understand poetry as the prototypical realm for the occurrence and engagement of textual connotations, and we should therefore take poetry into account when we study meaning. Linguists often consider poetry to be an inappropriate source for their research – it is thought to be the realm of the linguistically exceptional or the linguistically atypical – but it is actually poetry that represents an unparalleled source for investigating “weak” semantic connotations (cf. Pajdzińska & Tokarski, 2010). Various types of connotations are richly realized in poetry: it is possible not only to find them there, but also, given the poetic context, to grasp and interpret them. In this regard, then, we can understand poetry (and artistic writing in general) as the prototypical realm for the evocative realization of discourse potential. There is of course more to it than just this. Artistic texts, as sui generis manifestations of linguistic worldviews, also represent a realm in which specific reconceptualizations and reinterpretations of conventional worlds, stereotypes, preconceptions, and other fixed conceptual interpretations are most often realized. Poetry is the true realm of “metaphors we live by” (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Lakoff & Turner, 1989: Vaňková, 2010).

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Connotations and reconceptualizations do not appear exclusively in artistic texts, but they do so both typically and distinctively in these kinds of texts, which is why we should consider these texts to be the prototypical realm for their realization. We might recall the words of Jan Mukařovský, writing about language’s “aesthetic function,” although we might also prefer to designate this function by the term aesthetic or cognitive-aesthetic potential of language: “The aesthetic function... is potentially present in every manifestation of language; hence the specific nature of poetic naming lies only in more radical revelation of the tendency inherent in every naming act” (Mukařovský, 1941, p. 188; italics mine). In the foreground, then, are those dimensions of speech – aspects of the text and, in our case, of aesthetic naming – that carry with them an evocation of experiences perceived through our body, senses, and emotions and that lead us, through such an evocation, to reach outward toward our experience of life, that is, toward our human existentiality. When we focus instead on the sign itself (or on the text itself, on naming itself in the abstract), then the text’s relation to our imminently given reality (in rough terms, the denotational or referential relation) is naturally weakened. Put succinctly: the evocative potential of words, which is given in a word’s connotations, predominates over denotation, but this does not happen quite so often in other realms of communication. Artistic texts therefore represent the prototypical realm in which speech is released from its functional servitude: it is not a tool, but a medium through which human existentiality is realized. And this is wrapped up in an enjoyable experience – an experience that questions and problematizes, to be sure, but also one in which free reign is given to play, imagination, and fascination. Even a linguist, much like a poet or philosopher, may be inclined to ask: Who exactly are we as people? And more importantly: if “words speak,” as Heidegger would have it, then what do they tell us? What do they tell us about how we understand the world and all of its parts? What do they tell us about things? What do they tell us about ourselves? We, as linguists, might orient ourselves toward these considerations by taking phenomenological philosophy as our starting point as well as by seeking analytic inspiration in poetry.

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References

Apresyan, Yuriy D. (1995). Obraz cheloveka po dannym yazyka: popytka sistemnogo opisaniya. Voprosy yazykoznaniya, 1, 37-67.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (2001). Styl potoczny. In Jerzy Bartmiński (Ed.), Współczesny język polski (pp. 115-134). Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (2009/2012). Aspects of Cognitive Ethnolinguistics. Ed. Jőrg Zinken. Sheffield and Oakville, CT: Equinox.

Bartmiński, Jerzy, & Panasiuk, Jolanta. (2001). Stereotypy językowe. In Jerzy Bartmiński (Ed.), Współczesny język polski (pp. 371-395). Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Fink, Eugen. (1996 [1958]). Bytí, pravda, svět. Předběžné otázky k pojmu „fenomén“. Praha: Oikoymenh.

Gadamer, Hans. (1999). Člověk a řeč. Praha: Oikoymenh.

Heidegger, Martin. (1993). Básnicky bydlí člověk. Praha: Oikoymenh.

Kratochvíl, Zdeněk. (1994). Filosofie živé přírody. Praha: Herrmann and Son.

Lakoff, George, & Johnson, Mark. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Lakoff, George, & Turner, Mark. (1989). More than Cool Reason. A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lubomirski, Karl. (2003). Pták nad hořícím lesem. Trans. R. Malý. Praha: BB Art.

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Mukařovský, Jan. (1941). Básnické pojmenování a estetická funkce jazyka. In Jan Mukařovský, Kapitoly z české poetiky I (pp. 180-188). Praha: Melantrich.

Mukařovský, Jan. (1971). O současné poetice. In Jan Mukařovský, Cestami poetiky a estetiky (pp. 99-115). Praha: Československý spisovatel.

Neubauer, Zdeněk. (1999). Chvála mateřštiny – lingvistický exkurs. In Ivan M. Havel, Martin Palouš, & Zdeněk Neubauer (Eds.), Svatojánský výlet (pp. 87-91). Praha: Malvern.

Neubauer, Zdeněk. (2001). Smysl a svět. Hermeneutický pohled na svět. Praha: Nadace Vize Dagmar a Václava Havlových.

Nezval, Vítězslav. (1956). Věci, květiny, zvířátka a lidé pro děti. Praha: Albatros.

Pajdzińska, Anna, & Tokarski, Ryszard. (2010). Jazykový obraz světa a kreativní text. Slovo a slovesnost, 71, 288-297.

Patočka, Jan. (1992 [1936]). Přirozený svět jako filosofický problém. Praha: Československý spisovatel.

Patočka, Jan. (1995). Tělo, společenství, jazyk, svět. Prague: Oikoymenh.

SČN. (1989 [1835-1839]). Slovník česko-německý. Josef Jungmann. Praha: Academia.

Skácel, Jan. (1996). Naděje s bukovými křídky. In Jan Skácel, Básně II. Brno: Blok.

SSČ. (1994). Slovník spisovné češtiny pro školu a veřejnost. Praha: Academia.

Tokarski, Ryszard. (2007). Konotace – prototypy – otevřené definice. In Lucie Saicová Římalová (Ed.), Čítanka textů z kognitivní lingvistiky II (pp. 13-25). Praha: Charles University Philosophical Faculty.

Turner, Mark. (1996). The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Vaňková, Irena. (2004). O věci a slově. Snad jsme tu jen, abychom řekli… In Jaroslava Pešková, Miloslav Průka, & Irena Vaňková (Eds.), Hledání souřadnic společného světa. Filosofie pro každý den (pp. 377-412). Praha: Eurolex Bohemia.

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Vaňková, Irena. (2010). Slovo v poezii. Inspirace kognitivnělingvistické. In Stanislava Fedrová (Ed.), Česká literatura – rozhraní a okraje. IV. kongres světové literárněvědné bohemistiky (pp. 425-437). Praha: Akropolis.

Wierzbicka, Anna. (1996). Semantics: Primes and Universals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wolker, Jiří. (1958). Host do domu (1921). In Dílo Jiřího Wolkra. Praha: SNKLHU.

Translated by David S. Danaher

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Chapter 5 Ethnolinguistics and literature: the meaning of svědomí ‘conscience’ in the writings of Václav Havel

David S. Danaher University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA

Co všechno dnešnímu světu hrozí, víme velmi dobře, vůle k odvrácení těchto hrozeb je však pramálo. Čili: nestačí říkat pravdu, je třeba, aby se vzpamatovalo lidské svědomí.

We know quite well what threatens our world today, but there is precious little will to deter those threats. Or rather: it’s not enough to speak the truth, it is necessary to awaken our human conscience.

Václav Havel, November 19951

1. Introduction

Of the many paradoxes associated with Václav Havel is one that renders his writing an ideal candidate for comparative ethnolinguistic analysis: Havel is a Czech writer who has achieved world renown primarily through translations of his texts into English. The implications of this paradox for reading Havel have yet to be acknowledged in existing scholarship on Havel. Indeed, many commentators on Havel in the English-speaking world are themselves not proficient in Czech and have operated under the assumption that the translated versions of his texts are canonical. This unconscious assumption fails to raise a question that follows logically from Havel’s paradox: how do the English translations differ from the original texts in Czech and how might these differences influence our

1 This citation is taken from an interview in the magazine Kavárna. Havel’s speeches and other texts as president are available online, indexed by year, at http://old.hrad.cz/ president/Havel/speeches/index.html. Translations from Czech to English are mine (D.D.) unless otherwise cited.

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reading and interpretation of them? Answering this question seems like a proper task for a kind of literary criticism that is grounded in ethnolinguistic analysis. The question has particular relevance with regard to key concepts or key words in the texts – words that represent core vocabulary in Havel’s thinking. While Wierzbicka (1997) uses the term “key word” in application to a language or culture,2 it would also seem productive to apply the same strategy to literature: that is, to search for and analyze words that occupy a key position in a work – or even the entire oeuvre – of a given author because they exhibit a special organizational and semantic potential for that work or for that particular author’s whole system of thought. Given Havel’s paradox, a focus on Havelian key words begs the question of the extent to which the meanings of their English translations are, from an ethnolinguistic perspective, indeed equivalent to the meanings of the Czech originals. To be clear, I do not intend to suggest that this is a question of the translations themselves, and I am certainly not casting doubt on the skills of Paul Wilson, Havel’s main English translator, whose work is exemplary. Indeed, as we will see, the Havelian key word under consideration here – Czech svědomí – has an absolutely stable translation equivalent into English – conscience – that the translator is necessarily obliged to use. Rather, the nature of the question is ethnolinguistic in Bartmiński’s sense of the term in that ethnolinguistics is a discipline that:

deals with manifestations of culture in language… It attempts to discover the traces of culture in the very fabric of language, in word meanings, phraseology, word formation, syntax and text structure. It strives to reconstruct the worldview entrenched in language as it is projected by the experiencing and speaking subject. (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 10)

In this regard, ethnolinguistics has a potentially significant role to play in literary analysis, not only for reading and interpreting literary texts in the context of one culture but perhaps especially for comparing the interpretation of literary works in the original with their translations.3 An application of ethnolinguistic analysis to literature ought to respect the texts as literature and strive to engage with the literary-critical discussion

2 Vaňková (2010) contains a useful discussion of and commentary on Wierzbicka’s understanding of the term. 3 Bartmiński (2009/2012) contains a discussion of comparative ethnolinguistics in chapter 17 where a proposal is made to initiate investigation of semantic discrepancies in terms for values that have sociopolitical or ethical import. Examples given include democracy, human rights, justice, sovereignty, freedom, homeland (p. 220).

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surrounding both the texts and their author. This is quite a different approach from using works of literature as resources in ethnolinguistic analysis proper, a valuable methodology in its own right. In the sense, however, that I am advocating it here, the application of ethnolinguistic analysis to literature may be considered a hybrid discipline in which a literary figure is investigated with help from an ethnolinguistic ground (see Danaher, 2007; Gross, 1997; and Vaňková, 2005). Ethnolinguistics is, then, a methodological tool that can contribute to the ongoing literary-critical dialogue. The result of such an investigation will ideally represent a contribution to both ethnolinguistics proper as well as literary criticism. Ethnolinguistic grounding can open up our reading of a text by developing an understanding of the meaning and semantic potential of key words in it, which has implications for criticism at the textual level (the aesthetic organization of the text) as well as at the personal level (the reader’s response to it).4 Put another way: if defamiliarization is one of the main functions of literature, then it is helpful to know the starting point of that process or the “familiar” meaning that the work of literature seeks to reshape and reframe; such an awareness helps us arrive at an appreciation of the literariness of the author’s project and allows us to better visualize our personal relationship to that project. The literary-critical discussion may benefit from an ethnolinguistic approach because familiarity – which comes into being through the interplay of language and culture – is the very thing that ethnolinguistics seeks to uncover and describe. More specifically and in the context of the present contribution, I will show that the status of svědomí as a key word in Václav Havel’s writing and thinking is essentially a response to the ethnolinguistic claim that cultural concepts have cognitive reality (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 13). Key words in Havel’s writings and thinking are not difficult to identify,5 and they tend to be key in the broader sense of extending across a range of texts and time periods. They are words that Havel continually returns to because they act as metaphysical touchstones in his thinking. Svědomí, especially in its relationship to a kind of responsibility (odpovědnost) that lies at the core of human identity, is one of those words.6 It is a key word in Havel’s pre-1989 so-called “dissident” essays and forms the central motif of his 1984 essay entitled Politika a svědomí (Politics and Conscience). It is one of a handful of words that comprise the core vocabulary in his philosophical letters from prison (Letters to Olga) written in

4 See Danaher 2002, 2003a, and 2003b for examples. 5 See Danaher (2010b) for an exploration of three such words. 6 Danaher (2010b, pp. 253ff) sketches an approach, amplified here, to svědomí as a Havelian key word.

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the late 1970s and early 1980s. Although not represented verbally, conscience – as Havel understands it – is arguably a major theme of his plays, which often prefigure the more rationalized explications of the same themes that we find in the essays. Finally, conscience is also a touchstone concept in Havel’s post-1989 presidential speeches and other texts (1989-2003), which Havel conceived of as a coherent collection with later speeches building upon earlier ones (and, we might add, the post-1989 texts as a whole building upon Havel’s pre-1989 writings). In analyzing Havel’s reframing of the meaning of svědomí and its relationship to, on the one hand, the conventional Czech understanding of svědomí and, on the other, English conscience, I will first trace the development of Havel’s thought and only then provide a comparative ethnolinguistic account to ground it. Havel’s approach to svědomí will be captured in a sampling of key contexts from his pre-1989 essays, in the relationship between the “voice of Being (hlas bytí)” and svědomí as developed in Letters to Olga, and in contexts from his post- 1989 texts that reinforce and extend these considerations. In the comparative ethnolinguistic analysis, I will focus on the etymologies of svědomí and conscience and the bearing that they have on the contemporary semantic value of each word in Czech and English respectively, on one common metaphorical conceptualization associated with both words, and finally on scholarly – as well as naive – evidence that speaks to each word‘s meaning.

2. The Literary Figure: Svědomí as a Havelian Key Word

In his 1984 essay Politika a svědomí (Politics and conscience), Havel problematizes the contemporary meaning of the word by arguing that modern man has privatized conscience by locking it up in our bathrooms and thereby cutting it off from engagement with the world. Conscience – and the responsibility that ought to come naturally with it – is reduced to a personal matter or what Havel calls a “phantom of subjectivity” [přeluda subjektivity] (1991, p. 255; 1999, 4, p. 425). An echo of the conscience-in-the-bathroom image appears in the essay Thriller, written about the same time, where Havel imagines modern “demons” in business attire who inflict moral ruin on the world as the “gods” sequester themselves in the “refuge” of individual conscience: “Démoni si prostě dělají, co chtějí, zatímco bohové se plaše skrývají v posledním útulku, který jim byl vykázán a který se nazývá lidské svědomí” [“The demons simply do what they want while the gods take diffident refuge in the final asylum to which they have been driven, called human conscience”] (1991, p. 288; 1999, 4, p. 510). A privatized and personalized understanding of conscience – a conscience

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seeking refuge from the world – is decidedly not what Havel intends to invoke when he writes dramatically of the need to “awaken our human conscience” in the citation that serves as epigraph to this chapter. Havel is not the only modern intellectual to have raised the question of the privatization or individualization of conscience. Jedediah Purdy, for example, has noted that in the American cultural tradition, “free conscience” came to be understood as “being true to oneself,” which risks both failing to look beyond oneself and thereby falling into a solipsism “that is often as banal and derivative as it is self-impressed” (2010, p. 21). In more hard-hitting terms than Havel, Purdy wonders “whether the spirit of conscience that Burke called ‘the dissidence of dissent’ has arrived at the end of history as full-blown narcissism” (p. 22). In Politics and Conscience, Havel places the phrase lidské svědomí ‘human conscience’ at the very end of the essay as the culminating term in a rhetorical question that he leaves for the reader to ponder: does not hope for a better future, Havel asks, lie in making “a real political force out of a phenomenon so ridiculed by the technicians of power – the phenomenon of human conscience?” (1991, p. 271; 1999, 4, p. 445). The essay as a whole defamiliarizes our conventional understanding of conscience and specifically its relationship to politics. By liberating conscience from the confines of the individual mind – by freeing it from Purdy’s narcissism – Havel presents a possible way out of the existential crisis that engulfs the modern world. The groundwork for Havel’s reframing of conscience in the essays of the mid- 1980s was laid in his 1979-1983 philosophical letters from prison, published in 1983 as Dopisy Olze (Letters to Olga), in which ruminations on svědomí comprise a central theme. Foreshadowing the bathroom image, Havel notes that conscience as an active force in the world is but a shadow of what it ought to be: it has become perfunctory, ritualized, a mere formality. The crisis of the modern world is a crisis of human identity and human responsibility, but Havel insists that an “orientation toward Being” – which conscience somehow embodies – has not disappeared. After all, “who would dare to deny that they have a conscience?” (letter 142). The “voice of Being” has not died out: “we know it summons us [že nás volá], and as human beings, we cannot pretend not to know what it is calling us to [k čemu nás volá]” (letter 142). We have many ways in the modern world of drowning out that voice (“[i]t is just that these days, it is easier to cheat, silence or lie to that voice” [letter 142]), but no matter how badly we behave, there is always a voice in some corner of our spirit saying that we ought not to have done so. Indeed, throughout the letters Havel emphasizes the dialogic nature of conscience and its inherent relationship to what he terms the “voice of Being” [hlas bytí]. This frees conscience from its cage of narcissism as conscience is understood to be not so much an inner, personal voice but rather an internalized manifestation of the voice of Being itself. In letter 139, Havel claims that while

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the hlas bytí informs the voice of conscience, it is greater than that personal voice. At the same time, the personal voice of conscience manifests the interconnectedness of two worlds, the world of man (the concrete human here and now) and the world of the transcendental (of God, of the absolute). These worlds are one and the same, but our access to Being is necessarily grounded in the former: “Being is one, it is everywhere and behind everything; it is the Being of everything and the only way to it is the one that leads through this world of mine and through this ‘I’ of mine” (letter 139). Conscience is internal to the individual only in the sense that its personalized voice represents a concrete realization of the transcendent voice of Being: rather than saying that conscience (Being) is in us, it would be more true to say, in Havel’s interpretation, that we are in conscience (Being). Havel’s focus on the voice of Being in its relation to conscience is not surprising given Heidegger’s influence – largely via Jan Patočka, Charter 77’s philosophical godfather – on Czechoslovak dissident intellectuals. According to Hannah Arendt, Heidegger’s later writings are unusual in the Western philosophical tradition for Heidegger’s emphasis on hearing over seeing as a primary metaphor for thinking: “Metaphors drawn from hearing are very rare in the history of philosophy, the most notable modern exception being the late writings of Heidegger, where the thinking ego ‘hears’ the call of Being” (Arendt, 1978, p. 111).7 Havel seems to have borrowed Heidegger’s metaphor of the “soundless voice of Being” and elaborated it in his treatment of conscience. In Letters to Olga, Havel hangs his philosophical argument concerning conscience on one concrete and rather trivial experience: you are in an empty night tram and have to decide whether or not to pay the fare for the ride. Your “voice of conscience” is activated, and Havel insists that the resulting inner dialogue takes the form of an exchange between your ego and a “partner” that is outside of your ego and therefore not identical with it:

This “partner”, however, is not standing beside me; I can’t see it, nor can I quit its sight: its eyes and its voice follow me everywhere; I can neither escape it nor outwit it: it knows everything. Is it my so-called “inner voice”, my “superego”, my “conscience”? Certainly, if I hear it calling me to responsibility [slyším-li jeho volání k odpovědnosti], I hear this call within me [slyším toto volání v sobě], in my mind and my

7 In this connection, Arendt notes the Jewish tradition of “a God who is heard but not seen” and compares Hebrew truth, which is “heard”, versus the Greek vision of the true (1978, p. 111). Some implications of Arendt’s statement with regard to the ethnolinguistics of the senses are discussed in Vaňková 2007 (pp. 176ff) and Vaňková et al. 2005 (pp. 98, 109, 132).

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heart; it is my own experience, profoundly so, though different from the experiences mediated to me by my senses. This, however, does nothing to alter the fact that the voice addresses me and enters into conversation with me, in other words, it comes to my “I” – which I trust is not schizoid – from the outside. (letter 137)

One thing seems clear to Havel: that our “I,” if it has not completely suppressed its orientation toward Being, “has a sense of responsibility purely and simply because it relates intrinsically to Being as that in which it feels the only coherence, meaning and the somehow inevitable ‘clarification’ of everything that exists… because it hears within and around itself the ‘voice’ in which this Being addresses and calls out to it [kterým ho toto bytí oslovuje a volá]” (letter 137).8 Commenting on Havel’s understanding of the relation between conscience and responsibility, Radim Palouš has written that Havelian responsibility exerts an “ever-present claim” upon us and that this claim “may be expressed as the ‘mere’ voice of conscience” (Palouš, 1997, p. 171). Havel insists that we rely on this voice as a moral instinct. It represents something simultaneously inside and outside of us: “Indeed, it is through conscience that a demand to be in harmony with the world’s moral order is exerted upon us” (Palouš, 1997, p. 171). Conscience initiates a dialogue with Being. Havel’s reframing suggests a latent dramatic potential in the voice of conscience and its relation to the voice of Being. The “absolute horizon” of meaning – the voice of Being that “calls out [volá]” to us – is “present in us not only as an assumption, but also as a source of humanity [zdroj lidskosti] and a challenge [apel]” (letter 95). Conscience is a uniquely human experience that serves as a challenge or appeal [apel], and this is a characterization that explicitly references Havel’s dramatic style, which is associated with the “theater of the appeal” [divadlo apelu].9 (This leads us into another argument – that Havel is primarily a playwright because theater of the appeal is the genre that best expresses his approach to meaning and the key role that conscience plays in it – but one that would be more profitably undertaken in another venue.)

8 In an earlier letter, Havel defines responsibility [odpovědnost] in terms of being responsible to or for something else (one responds or odpovídá) that is usually concrete and immediate, although not only so. The “particular incarnation” of one’s responsibility does not exhaust the matter: “there is always something ‘more’, something ‘outside’, something that transcends [přesahuje] it,” and sometimes we call this feeling “conscience,” and in doing so “we localize it within ourselves” (letter 109). 9 For an account of Havel as playwright with a discussion of his association with “theater of the appeal,” see Rocamora 2004.

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By the time Havel becomes president, first of Czechoslovakia and then of the Czech Republic, his conceptual reframing of svědomí has been established. The presidential speeches and other published texts from this time reinforce and extend this reframing, continuing to insist on the importance of conscience (as Havel describes it) for confronting the existential and moral crisis that defines the modern world. A non-exhaustive list of post-1989 contexts that reinforce and extend his reframing would include the following:

(1) The argument that conscience ought not to be understood as “psychologized” or “localized” in our minds is reinforced in, among others, a speech at the University of Malta (Valetta), where Havel notes that svědomí is activated when we fail to do something good or when we do something wrong. This, however, is a psychologized characterization of conscience as a mere sentiment “as if conscience was a particular segment of our brain, identifiable within a certain area, or some kind of singular feature of a human being” (Valletta 2002). The reality is more complicated: responsibility means “awareness [jsme si vědomi] that there is someone who watches us,” and we are “intrinsically conscious of that silent eye and relate to it.”

(2) In place of psychological localization, the dialogic aspects of conscience are described in a 1991 speech before a joint meeting of the Czechoslovak parliament (Vystoupení ve federálním shromáždění, 24 September) where Havel emphasizes both that svědomí is activated in any kind of dialogue and that dialogue means both speaking and listening.10 This sentiment is echoed a decade later in a speech given in New York when Havel states that although each of us may have a conscience, not all of us heed its voice and many of us have become skilled at deceiving it.

(3) Conscience as a point of access to the transcendent is consistently reinforced (for example, in the major international speeches given at Asahi Hall in Japan in 1992 and George Washington University in 1993). It is subjectively through our individual consciences that we establish a connection with the metaphysical order that both includes and transcends us. In a 1996 speech at Trinity College, Havel quite explicitly defines conscience and responsibility as “a certain attitude of man toward that which reaches beyond him, that is, toward infinity and eternity, the transcendental, the mystery of the world, the order of Being.” This sentiment is echoed in his 1999 speech at Macalester College where conscience is equated with a moral order that promotes love for fellow humans.

10 This speech is available only in the original Czech.

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(4) A final theme reinforced in the post-1989 texts is that conscience is the hope for the future, a sleeping force whose potential has yet to be tapped: “A conscience slumbers in every human being, something divine. And that is what we have to put our trust in” (Harvard University 1995).

(5) Havel extends his pre-1989 account by granting conscience a key role in bringing down the socialist regimes in Central Europe (Davos 1992) with the corollary that an understanding of politics as moral conscience was what the post-1989 East could offer the West (Warsaw 1999). For Havel, this was, in fact, the true meaning and lesson of the dissident movement in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and elsewhere: “Our fundamental experience has taught us very clearly that only politics that is preceded by conscience really has any meaning”11 (Warsaw 1999).

(6) A further extension derives directly from the argument made in Politics and conscience (as well as in a number of Havel’s plays): that the technological, scientific age of humanity – an age that privileges explaining over understanding12 – lacks a conscience in the sense that Havel conceives of it. In a speech in February 1990 to commemorate the anniversary of the 1948 communist-party putsch in Czechoslovakia, Havel notes: “Science [věda] does not have a conscience. It is certainly beautiful and important…, but the human spirit is not mere rationality [rozum]. It is judgment. Deliberation. Conscience. Decency [slušnost]. Tact. Love for those close to us. Responsibility. Courage. Stepping away from the self. Doubt. Even humor”13 (Prague, 25 February 1990). In other speeches, Havel similarly suggests that human conscience lags behind technological and scientific knowledge, which may very well be the modern world’s defining dilemma.

(7) Havel’s final post-1989 extension is his suggestion that conscience plays the same key role in shaping modern democratic political communities that it played in the dissident era under socialism. Democracy is defined as an “unending journey” and a “constant appeal [trvalá výzva] to the human spirit and human conscience” (Prague, 12 March 1996). The task of Europe – the meaning of which ought not

11 The English version of this speech online has a serious mistranslation, rendering the original Czech “politika, které předchází svědomí” as “politics that precede conscience,” which is the exact opposite of the intended meaning. 12 For a discussion of the dichotomy between explaining and understanding that underlies much of Havel’s thinking, see Danaher (2007). 13 A translation of this speech is not available.

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to be reduced to cooperation on economic and political matters – is to once again find its conscience and sense of responsibility in the world (Aachen 1996). Cultivating this extended understanding is the chief responsibility of intellectuals, who are the “conscience of society” (Wellington 1995).

By way of summing up Havel’s reshaping of the meaning of conscience over the course of his literary and political career, we might look back at the epigraph to this contribution, in which he plainly pins hope for the future of humanity on the awakening of “human conscience.” What Havel means by this is just what we have explored in this section on conceptualizing conscience as literary figure. The awakening of human conscience – and Havel frequently insists on the adjective “human” in reference to conscience as if to continually emphasize the responsibility that having a conscience places on us as human beings14 – presupposes a reconceptualization of its spiritual and cultural meaning. While a degenerate understanding of conscience – that ultimately leads to solipsism – localizes it in the individual’s mind as an exclusively internal dialogue, Havel imagines conscience as a transcendent dialogue with Being – an appeal for engagement in and with the world – that has the potential to be a game-changing political and moral force. If lexis is a classifier of social experience that “provides access to the conceptual sphere, to the realm of ideas and images important in a given culture” (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 17), then Havel seeks to influence the cultural sphere through a careful and systematic redefinition of the meaning of human “conscience.” The status of svědomí as a key word in Havel’s thinking is therefore a response to the ethnolinguistic claim that cultural concepts have cognitive reality. The extent to which Havel’s redefinition of svědomí differs from the conventional meaning of the concept remains, however, to be determined. In other words, if Havel defamiliarizes, then what is his starting point, the familiar ground? And to extend this line of thinking: is that ground the same for Czech svědomí as it is for English conscience? These are essentially ethnolinguistic questions, and it is to them that I now turn.

14 Indeed, the adjective lidský (along with the derived word lidskost) represents another key word in Havel, especially in his post-1989 texts: in the presidential speeches, Havel uses this adjective in combination with over one hundred different nouns. Translating lidský into English is not as straightfoward as it might seem since its meaning can subtly blend the meaning of the two separate (although obviously related) English words human and humane. See Danaher (2010a).

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3. The ethnolinguistic ground: Svědomí and Conscience Compared

In comparing Czech svědomí with English conscience, we first note that they are, etymologically speaking, parallel: each has a prefix meaning with (s- and con- respectively) attached to a suffixed root with the original meaning of knowledge (-vědomí and -science).15 The origin of both words implies a form of mental deliberation that comes “with knowledge” of the world, and this brings them close to Havel’s extended definition: conscience establishes a relationship between ourselves (our inner voice) and events in the world at large (the voice of Being). In other words, conscience responds to questions that are raised by our experience in and knowledge of the world: what we know should therefore be closely related to what we do and how we act (Saul, 1997, p. 181). The etymological identity already exposes, however, a crucial difference in how the words resonate in each language: the Czech root for “knowing” (-věd-) is more etymologically and semantically transparent in a host of other common words related to knowledge, consciousness, and awareness than the comparable English root (-sci-), which, if anything, might tend to associate English conscience with a particular – scientific – kind of knowledge. A partial list of Czech words where -věd- is immediately perceivable and where a connection between svědomí and knowing or awareness is therefore strongly felt include the following: vědět ‘to know’ (Polish wiedzieć), věda ‘scholarship, science’ (Pol. wiedza), vědomí ‘consciousness’ (Pol. świadomość), povědomí ‘awareness’ (Pol. świadomość), and uvědomit si ‘to realize, become aware of’ (Pol. uświadomić sobie). By comparison, the -sci- in conscience is conceptually opaque: even the connection between conscience and consciousness is, at best, only tenuously felt. Whereas Czech has one root that serves as a semantic locus for many experiences of “knowing,” the multiplicity of English roots for “knowing” fails to activate a connection between conscience and Being that Havel privileges and extends in his interpretation. A crucial concept in the Czech vědomí-svědomí nexus proves to be the Czech terms for witnessing: svědek ‘witness’ (Pol. świadek) and svědectví ‘testimony’ (Pol.

15 Etymological and lexical information on svědomí is taken from Gebauer (1970), Jungmann (1989 [1835]), and Machek (1968). In Polish we encounter a somewhat different situation. The word świadomość follows the same etymological path as conscience and svědomí, but it means consciousness or awareness. In Polish, conscience is sumienie, which consists of the now unproductive prefix są- ‘with’ and Old Polish mnienie (thinking or conviction: cf. Greek mnéme ‘memory’ or Latin men, mentis ‘reason’). I am grateful to Adam Głaz for this clarification.

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świadectwo). The Czech words derivationally conflate knowledge, witnessing, and conscience.16 In Jungmann’s entry on svědomí, the second meaning is listed as svědectví, glossed as Latin testimonium, and it is this witnessing connection that is arguably more activated in the meaning of Czech svědomí as opposed to English conscience. The association of svědomí with svědectví also helps lay the groundwork for Havel’s creative extension of the meaning of the former. Indeed, in an analysis of faith and belief in Havel’s writings, Milan Balabán sees Havel’s concept of the “absolute horizon of Being” as “the most important witness [svědek]... of the deliberations that we have with ourselves on a daily basis” (2009, pp. 43-44): in other words, svědomí – in Havel’s extended philosophical sense – is a dialogue with the svědek of Being, and this is an active kind of witnessing since we, who also belong to Being, both observe and simultaneously participate in it. Although Balabán does not mention it, it would be productive to read Havel’s plays within what might be called a “witnessing framework”: the theater of the appeal activates conscience by transforming theater-goers in the audience into witnesses. The witnessing element in Havel’s dramatic style is embodied in particular by the character of Vaněk, who appears in three of Havel’s plays and has been turned into a theatrical device by other playwrights (Goetz- Stankiewicz, 1987). As Havel himself has said about the “dramatic principle” that is Vaněk:

[H]e does not usually do or say much, but his presence on stage and his being what he is make his environment expose itself in one way or another… He is, then, a kind of “key”, opening certain – always different – vistas onto the world… a kind of catalyst, a gleam if you will, in whose light we view a landscape. And although without it we should scarcely be able to see anything at all, it is not the gleam that matters, but the landscape. (quoted in Rocamora, 2004, p. 381)

If the semantic development of Czech svědomí in relation to other words in the same etymological and derivational network reaffirms a connection to witnessing, the meaning of English conscience seems to have shifted away from the knowledge-witnessing relationship toward the more personalized or privatized understanding of conscience that Havel aggressively polemicizes with in Politics and conscience and elsewhere. This development also seems to have

16 Cf. also the situation in English. The ModE witness comes from OldE witnes ‘knowledge,’ and wit can be linked with the Latin videre ‘see’ or Sanskrit vidati ‘(he) knows,’ which contains the same root as the Polish widzieć ‘see’ or wiedzieć ‘know.’

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run parallel with the narrowing of the meaning of English conscious as outlined in Humphrey (1999, pp. 117ff). Humphrey notes the etymological structure of the word and states that the original meaning of the Latin verb conscire (from which the adjective conscius is derived) was “to share knowledge widely.” As time passed, the usage changed, “and it shifted to mean sharing knowledge with some people but not others, sharing it within a small circle – and thus being privy to a secret” (p. 118). This knowledge circle narrowed even further “until eventually it included just a single person, the subject who was conscious” (p. 118). Humphrey sums up:

Thus, as the English language has evolved (and perhaps as the users of the language have become more self-concerned and introspective), the meaning of the word ‘conscious’ has not only become narrower and narrower, it has in effect turned around. Rather like the word window, which has changed in meaning from ‘a hole where the wind come in’ to ‘a hole where the wind does not come in,’ conscious has changed from ‘having shared knowledge’ to ‘having intimate knowledge not shared with anyone except oneself.’ (p. 119)

The parallel with a privatized conscience (or one that is locked up in the bathroom) is rather striking. At the very least, the narrowing of the dialogic aspects of English conscious – its journey from sharing to not sharing – is similar to the way in which the “voice” of conscience has come to be internalized. Both svědomí and conscience share a conventional metaphorical association with a voice (Uličný, 1999), but the schema suggested by the voice metaphor is open to a variety of elaborations. Is it a voice entirely inside one’s head – an inner dialogue with oneself – or, as Havel advocates, an inner voice that instantiates a connection with the very voice of Being? In other words, we conventionally understand conscience as something internal to each of us, whereas Havel instead argues that we are participants in a dialogue with Being that is activated by conscience. This distinction evokes Erich Fromm’s writing on modern identity and specifically the opposition that he details between, on the one hand, having or using and, on the other, being. Fromm wrote: “Man became a collector and a user. More and more, the central experience of his life became I have and I use, and less and less I am. The means – namely, material welfare, production, and the production of goods – thereby became the ends” (2005, p. 21). In Fromm’s terms, then, a privatized conscience is one that we have and that we use. Opposed to this is Havel’s understanding of conscience – an understanding grounded in the knowing-witnessing nexus – that is much less a matter of practical utility and much more a matter of who we fundamentally are.

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Existing scholarship on the conventional meaning of conscience confirms a tendency toward conceptual narrowing (personalization) and a having/using interpretation. Miroslava Nejedlá (2001) studied the semantics of Czech vědomí (consciousness) and svědomí in comparison with English and concluded in part that English conscience seems to be understood as more of a mechanism than Czech svědomí: with conscience there is more of an element of individual will that makes its function potentially controllable by an exertion of that will (2001, p. 29). This correlates with a sense of duty or moral obligation in conscience, a sense not as strongly felt in the meaning of svědomí. The qualms or prickings of Czech svědomí “are considered to be phenomena independent of the will of the subject who is undergoing them” (p. 30). Perhaps another way of making the same point would be to say that English conscience – in comparison with Czech svědomí – is conceptualized more as an ability, one that we have and that we use. In this connection and in the American context, we might mention Stanley Fish’s recent discussion (Fish, 2009) in the New York Times of the so-called “conscience clause” that allows medical professionals to deny healthcare (for example, contraception) that they believe runs counter to their own moral or religious beliefs. Fish notes that it is so named “because it affirms the claims of conscience – one’s inner sense of what is right – against the competing claims of professional obligations.” He then, however, demonstrates that the meaning of conscience has radically changed over time. Fish cites Hobbes, who had quite a different sense of the word and who argued that considering conscience to be “the private arbiter of right and wrong” was a “corrupted usage” invented by those who desired “to elevate ‘their own… opinions’ to the status of reliable knowledge and try to do so by giving them ‘that reverenced name of Conscience.’” The sense, then, that conscience represents an inner mechanism for determining right from wrong is entrenched in modern English to such an extent that it has become the substance of legal maneuvering, but, at the same time, this entrenched sense is not entirely beyond dispute. Predating and foreshadowing Fish’s discussion of the “conscience clause” is Anna Wierzbicka’s tracing of the historical development of the English concepts right and wrong and the extension of these originally conversational words into the ethical realm – a realm that includes conscience (Wierzbicka, 2006). She argues that the rise of right and wrong is a language- and culture-specific phenomenon, and it sets English apart from other European languages in which good and bad – which have a more general meaning and are less subject to an individual’s will – still hold sway. She writes: “[T]he ascendancy of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ over ‘good’ and ‘bad’ seems to reflect a more rational, more procedural, more reason-based approach to human life and a retreat from a pure distinction between GOOD and BAD unsupported by any appeal to reason, procedures, methods, or intersubjectively available evidence” (2006, p. 72). In Wierzbicka’s analysis, ethical decision-making has evolved into a matter of good thinking (like

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scientific thinking) and interpersonal validation: “It is a rational ethics, an ethics that doesn’t need to be grounded in metaphysics (in particular, in God) but can be grounded in reason” (2006, p. 72).17 The concepts of right and wrong are, in this view, Anglo-cultural constructs (Wierzbicka, 2006, p. 65). When other concepts are defined in terms of right and wrong, these concepts are then imbued with the Anglo-specific associations related to right and wrong. In this regard, Wierzbicka specifically mentions conscience, which is defined in the Oxford Companion to Philosophy as “the sense of right and wrong in an individual” (p. 66). She notes that this was not, in fact, how philosophers who were not speakers of modern English understood conscience, and gives the example of Aquinas: “But for Aquinas, conscience was not ‘the sense of right and wrong,’ but rather the sense of bonum and malum, that is, ‘good’ and bad’… For speakers of most modern European languages, too, ‘conscience’ is usually linked with the notions ‘good’ and ‘bad’, rather than ‘right’ and ‘wrong’” (p. 66). If Nejedlá, Fish, and Wierzbicka are correct, then we could conclude that conventional usage of English conscience strongly implies the kind of understanding that Havel cautions against: it has been privatized and rationalized, reduced to a mechanism in each of our minds that is more or less subject to our control. The conventional meaning of Czech svědomí, however, seems to resist this process whether it be because the concepts of good and bad still predominate over right and wrong (Wierzbicka) and individual will is less emphasized (Nejedlá) or, and this might be stating the same idea in different terms, the relationship between an individual and her or his awareness (vědomí) of the world – a relationship mediated by svědomí and its semantic/derivational network – is more foregrounded. In Fromm’s terms, English conscience privileges a having/using mode while Czech svědomí leaves more semantic space for an interpretation in the being mode – a space that Havel uses to full effect in his conceptual reimagining of the import of svědomí for the modern world. By way of summing up this comparative analysis, we might move away from scholarly investigations and consider naïve evidence of the semantic distinction between Czech svědomí and English conscience. Comparison of the respective English and Czech Wikipedia pages devoted to conscience and svědomí provides

17 Both Wierzbicka’s focus on a “rational ethics” and the notion that English conscience – in opposition to Czech svědomí – might be understood more as a mechanism or ability raise the question of whether reason itself is also a mechanism or ability. It can be and, of course, has been (or conventionally is?) construed as such, but this may very well also be a culturally grounded understanding. For a persuasive counter-argument in the cognitive- linguistics tradition, see Johnson 2007.

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just this sort of evidence and confirms the analysis that has been offered here.18 The English page from the outset defines conscience as “an aptitude, faculty, intuition, or judgment of the intellect that distinguishes right from wrong”; dialogic aspects of the term are downplayed while its potential link to reason is highlighted (if questioned). A possible feature of the naïve semantics of conscience that has not been considered here – but perhaps ought to be looked at in the future – is its close association to religious or spiritual traditions: this association is given a special status in the English – but not the Czech – Wikipedia entry. In contrast, the Czech page does not mention “right” or “wrong”, and the focus from the outset is on the dialogic aspects of svědomí, which is defined as “vnitřní instance, mlčenlivé volání, které vede soudy člověka o tom, co sám způsobil nebo co se chystá způsobit [an inner authority, a silent calling that guides a person’s judgments about what he or she has done or intends to do].” Beyond the dialogic aspects, there is an emphasis on svědomí as a primarily procedural ability (schopnost) – as “sebereflexe, tj. schopnost uvažovat o sobě samém, podívat se na sebe jinýma očima než je pohled vlastního zájmu a prosazování [self-reflection, ie, the ability to contemplate one’s own self, to look at oneself through eyes other than ones concerned with one’s own interests and with self-promotion]” – and this is not privileged in the English entry. In the procedural part of the definition we also find a suggestion that svědomí inherently involves transcending self-interest whereas in the English entry on conscience, this semantic aspect is not foregrounded in any way other than stating that conscience is associated with “moral evaluations” (of right and wrong). The Czech page also has a section devoted to an etymological breakdown of the word svědomí and in which the vědomí – svědomí relationship is made explicit. This relationship is further underlined by the mention of fixed phrases in Czech that contain both words: for example, the oath uttered when assuming an important office that states that the person promises to carry out the duties “podle nejlepšího vědomí a svědomí” (literally, “according to the best of one’s consciousness and conscience”). English does not have an equivalent. The Wikipedia comparison serves to highlight the semantic differences between svědomí and conscience that we have previously noted. Some of these differences are stark while others are more a matter of nuance or emphasis. Considered together, they demonstrate that the conventional meaning of svědomí – which is

18 The English entry is available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscience, and the Czech at http://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svědomí. Wikipedia entries frequently change, and these pages were last accessed April 4, 2011.

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Havel’s conceptual ground, his starting point – already contains the seeds that will grow into Havel’s defamiliarizing semantic extension: conscience as, potentially, a moral and political force to be reckoned with in the modern world.19 In contrast to the meaning of svědomí, the entrenched meaning of English conscience is decidedly less amenable to the kind of aesthetic extension that Havel has in mind: the conventional understanding of conscience is, in fact, much closer to the privatized, mechanistic conceptualization that Havel sets out to undermine.

4. Conclusion

In other words, the semantics of svědomí provides more fertile ground for Havel’s argument than does the semantics of conscience: the English reader of Havel is obliged to make a greater leap of faith in following the line of Havel’s thinking because conscience is not, from an ethnolinguistic perspective, a semantic equivalent for svědomí. There is a hint of a “transcendent breeze” in svědomí that conscience lacks, and this seems to be true for a range of Havelian key words in comparison with their translations into English (Danaher, 2010b). Havel’s paradox – that he is a Czech writer who has gained world-wide influence as an intellectual through translations of his texts – is a phenomenon that warrants consideration, and ethnolinguistics can provide a methodology to ground the investigation. In conducting comparative ethnolinguistic research, Bartmiński has noted that comparing concepts related to “spiritual culture” presents the greatest challenge:

The comparative procedure is relatively straightforward in the case of objects unambiguously identifiable on the basis of extralinguistic empirical observation, such as the sun, stars, the elements, plants, animals or body parts. It is more difficult in the case of artifacts, such as clothes, prepared foods, kitchen utensils etc., very different in different cultures and environments. The most problematic are components of the spiritual culture, such as political, social or moral concepts and ideas. These are mainly untranslatable, specific to individual cultures and languages. (2009/2012, p. 216)

19 In light of Havel’s argument, should conscience be added to the list of value terms that Bartmiński (2009/2012, p. 220) suggests be ethnolinguistically studied because they have a direct bearing on sociopolitical and ethical questions? If Havel is to be taken at his word, then discrepancies in how we understand the term – and how it functions in both our individual lives and the life of society – may well lie at the heart of the success or failure of politics in the modern world.

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In analyzing terms related to spiritual culture, it is perhaps necessary to delve into literature – and ethnolinguistic literary analysis of the kind exemplified here – to help us better grasp the entrenched semantic value of each term and to help us better perceive its familiar starting point. Literature is, after all, at least partly concerned with reframing entrenched meanings, and I am reminded in this regard of Milan Kundera’s famous assertion regarding the novel: “A novel is often, it seems to me, nothing but a long quest for some elusive definitions” (1988, p. 127).20 If literature reshapes familiar meanings as part of its core mission – and if the cognitive definition itself is, as Bartmiński compellingly argues, a cultural narrative – then an ethnolinguistic approach to literature has a potentially crucial role to play in both ethnolinguistic analysis proper as well as literary criticism. It is in this dual spirit that the present contribution is offered.21

20 Note the recent best-selling epic novel by Jonathan Franzen (2010) entitled Freedom: the novel itself is a narrative reframing of the meaning of this key cultural term in the American context. 21 For supporting my investigations of key words in Havel’s writings, I am grateful to Christopher Ott, Irena Vaňková, Daniel Vojtěch, and to students in my monograph course on Havel at the University of Wisconsin (http://web.mac.com/pes/havel/). Sincere appreciation is extended to the Kruh přátel českého jazyka affiliated with Charles University in Prague for inviting me to present on svědomí and other words in November 2010. Many thanks also to Adam Głaz, Megan Munroe, Ruth Ann Stodola, and José Vergara for their thoughtful comments on an earlier version of this chapter.

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References

Arendt, Hannah. (1978). The Life of the Mind. New York: Harcourt Brace.

Balabán, Milan. (2009). Víra (u) Václava Havla. Praha: Oikoymenh.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (2009/2012). Aspects of Cognitive Ethnolinguistics. Ed. Jörg Zinken. Sheffield and Oakville, CT: Equinox.

Danaher, David S. (2002). The semantics of pity and žalost‘ in a literary context. Glossos, 3. [http://seelrc.org/glossos/issues/3/; last accessed Feb 19, 2013]

Danaher, David S. (2003a). A cognitive approach to metaphor in prose: Truth and falsehood in Leo Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Il’ich.” Poetics Today, 24 (3), 239- 269.

Danaher, David S. (2003b.) Conceptual metaphors for the domains TRUTH and FALSEHOOD in Russian and the Image of the Black Sack in Tolstoi’s “The Death of Ivan Il’ich”. In Robert A. Maguire & Alan Timberlake (Eds.), American Contributions to the 13th International Congress of Slavists (Volume 2: Literature) (pp. 61-75). Bloomington: Slavica.

Danaher, David S. (2007). Cognitive poetics and literariness: metaphorical analogy in Anna Karenina. In David Danaher & Kris van Heuckelom (Eds.), Perspectives on Slavic Literatures (pp. 183-207). Amsterdam: Pegasus. [Also published in Polish as (2006). Poetyka kognitywna a literackość: analogia metaforyczna w Annie Kareninie. Przestrzenie teorii, 6, 277-298.]

Danaher, David S. (2010a). An ethnolinguistic approach to key words in literature: lidskost and duchovnost in the writings of Václav Havel. Ročenka textů zahraničních profesorů, 4, 27-54. Prague: Charles University.

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Danaher, David S. (2010b). Translating Havel: three key words. Slovo a slovesnost, 71, 250-259.

Fish, Stanley. (2009). Conscience vs. conscience. New York Times, April 12, 2009. http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/conscience-vs-conscience/ [last accessed Feb 17, 2013]

Franzen, Jonathan. (2010). Freedom. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Fromm, Erich. (2005). On Being Human. New York: Continuum.

Gebauer, Jan. (1970). Slovník staročeský. Praha: Academia.

Goetz-Stankiewicz, Marketa. (Ed.). (1987). The Vaněk Plays. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.

Gross, Sabine. (1997). Cognitive readings; or, The disappearance of literature in mind. Poetics Today, 18 (2), 271-297.

Havel, Václav. (1983a). Dopisy Olze. Praha: Atlantis.

Havel, Václav. (1983b). Letters to Olga. Trans. Paul Wilson. New York: Henry Holt.

Havel, Václav. (1991). Open Letters. Trans. Paul Wilson et al. New York: Knopf.

Havel, Václav. (1999). Spisy. Praha: Torst.

Humphrey, Nicholas. (1999). A History of the Mind: Evolution and the Birth of Consciousness. New York: Copernicus.

Johnson, Mark. (2007). The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Jungmann, Josef. (1989 [1835]). Slovník česko-německý. Praha: Academia.

Kundera, Milan. (1988). The Art of the Novel. New York: Grove Press.

Machek, Václav. (1968). Etymologický slovník jazyka českého. Praha: Academia.

Nejedlá, Miroslava. (2001). Sémantické pole lexémů VĚDOMÍ a SVĚDOMÍ. Masters thesis: Charles University, Prague.

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Palouš, Radim. (1997). Filozofování s Havlem. In Anna Freimanová (Ed.), Milý Václave… tvůj: přemýšlení o Václavu Havlovi (pp. 162-187). Praha: Lidové noviny.

Purdy, Jedediah. (2010). A Tolerable Anarchy: Rebels, Reactionaries, and the Making of American Freedom. New York: Vintage.

Saul, John Ralston. (1997). The Unconscious Civilization. New York: The Free Press.

Rocamora, Carol. (2004). Acts of Courage: Václav Havel’s Life in the Theater. Hanover: Smith & Kraus.

Uličný, Oldřich. (1999). Hlas svědomí a mluvní akty. Prace filologiczne, 44, 529- 533.

Vaňková, Irena. (2005). Kognitivní lingvistika, řeč a poezie: předběžné poznámky. Česká literatura, 53 (5), 609-636.

Vaňková, Irena. (2007). Nádoba plná řeči. Praha: Karolinum.

Vaňková, Irena. (2010). Buďte v pohodě! (Pohoda jako české klíčové slovo). In Irena Vaňková & Jasňa Pacovská (Eds.), Obraz člověka v jazyce (pp. 31-57). Prague: Charles University Philosophical Faculty.

Vaňková, Irena, Nebeská, Iva, Římalová, Lucie Saicová, and Šlédrová, Jasňa. 2005. Co na srdci, to na jazyku. Praha: Karolinum.

Wierzbicka, Anna. (1997). Understanding Cultures through their Key Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wierzbicka, Anna. (2006). English: Meaning and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Chapter 6 Cognitive play in Daniil Kharms’ “Blue Notebook №10”1

José Vergara University of Madison-Wisconsin, USA

1. Introduction

As a master of the alogical and nonsensical, Daniil Kharms forces language into the most unusual of combinations. From his nonsensical poetry and children’s literature to the short Incidents and other prose, he intentionally brings together situations, words, and meanings in odd compositional arrangements. Through this deconstructive, seemingly anarchic method he activates certain linguistic functions and allows his readers to see beyond the logical world and into what he considered the world of true meanings (Kharms & Vvendensky, 1997, pp. 248-250) and the “purity of order” (Kharms, 2001, p. 79-80). The attainment of this higher order comes from a radical rethinking of literature and language as such. For Kharms writing is a performance and reading an event that actively implicates his audience. If we typically use language to construct and to ground ourselves within reality, then Kharms’ language attempts to reverse such a process and reveal the inconsistencies of existence by releasing words from their traditional meaning in this cognitive space. What we see, instead, are the new and explosive meanings created by those juxtapositions. The reader is able to experience the world anew due to Kharms’ awareness of cognitive play. Adopting a cognitive and ethnolinguistic approach can help elucidate exactly how and why Kharms’ artistic methods manage to accomplish these goals. Though the language of his Incidents cycle may be straightforward, the intricate manner in which Kharms constructed the texts speaks to a desire to invert expectations and experience on many levels. Neil Carrick has defined Kharms’ prose as a “‘collision’ with a familiar, hackneyed narrative sequence” (Carrick, 1995, p. 708), that is archetypal narratives and literary utterances. Kharms relies on this “pre-text” (a prototype), understood by the reader on some level, to invert

1 I would like to thank David Danaher, Karen Evans-Romaine, and Jenny Jalack for their careful readings of this chapter in its various stage of development.

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the art of writing at large. I argue that his generic and stylistic parodies are in turn supplemented by the parodic treatment of linguistic regularities. In short, an awareness of the cognitive and linguistic tricks that Kharms uses will illuminate the literariness of his prose. These techniques include blending concepts and construals,2 reversing prototypical reading processes, and layering of metaphor and metonymy. Such an analysis provides further insights into the nature of the author’s choices in language and how these impact readers’ intake of the text. Jerzy Bartmiński’s approach to ethnolinguistic analysis has been a vital catalyst in the development of these ideas. Bartmiński has proposed that “culture exists in language and constitutes its inalienable component” (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 11). The manner in which we comprehend both texts (cultural artifacts) and the world is thus always linked to the language we use. Moreover, Bartmiński assigns the following elements to the style of a text: “the worldview projected in a given style, the ontological status of that worldview, the rationality and communicative intentions it assumes” (p. 14). Each statement, whether written or spoken, then presupposes a particular conceptualization of reality. Behind this outlook lie the cognitive (or ethnolinguistic) values found inherently in the words one uses. Using “Blue Notebook №10” (Golubaya tetrad’ №10) as a primary case study, I will explore the connections between Kharms’ prose and the cognitive and ethnolinguistic processes at work in order to describe how Kharms manipulates construals for precise aesthetic effect. The cognitive-semantic relationship between the concepts BE and HAVE in Russian plays a most prominent role throughout Kharms’ Incidents cycle, a collection of thirty texts with little in common other than a predilection for senseless violence, unexpected turns of action, and the disorientating jerk of an unresolved ending. As such, I will begin with a short overview of the linguistic details concerning these two concepts – EXISTENCE (BEING) and POSSESSION (HAVING) – in relation to Kharms’ text. My focus will fall on apparently minute details when discussing this connection to Kharms “Blue Notebook №10” more closely, but linguistic analysis reveals exactly why these elements make the text so particularly effective and rich in meaning. After detailing Kharms’ use of BE/HAVE, I will consider additional related forms of cognitive play in “Blue Notebook №10”: the scale of subject definiteness as well as modes of sentence scanning. These considerations will lead naturally to a brief examination of Kharms’ cognitive play in other stories from the same cycle. Finally,

2 Taylor defines construal as the “process by which a given state is structured by a language-user for purposes of its linguistic expression” (2002, p. 589). Each individual “construes” any given phenomenon (a scene, person, object, etc.) in a different manner depending on his or her mental experience. For example, “the lamp may be above the table” or, conversely, “the table below the lamp.” The notion comes from Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar, whose author in a recent publication defines it as “our manifest ability to conceive and portray the same situation in alternate ways” (Langacker, 2008, p. 43).

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I will conclude by reflecting on translations of Kharms’ “Blue Notebook №10” in order to further elucidate the cognitive-ethnolinguistic essence of my analysis. Ultimately, I will show how the meaning of Kharms’ texts is not only a product, but inherently a function of his language as well. The meaning or message that Kharms wishes to convey is encoded into the very fabric of his words.

2. BEING and HAVING in Russian

Much has been written about the connection in Russian between BE and HAVE, which may be understood either purely linguistically or from a wider cognitive and philosophical perspective. Here I will provide an outline of materials most relevant to the present analysis. Most importantly, Steven Clancy (2001; 2005) has proposed a semantic nexus for BECOMING-BEING-UNBECOMING that takes into account all the multifarious lexical and semantic notions shared by BE and HAVE. The two concepts are shown to express many categories of meaning. Table 6.1 features a selection of Clancy’s findings.

Table 6.1 The BECOMING-BEING-UNBECOMING NEXUS (adapted from Clancy, 2001)

CATEGORY BECOMING BEING UNBECOMING

MAKE/DO existence BE (UNMAKE) BECOME GIVE, TAKE TAKE, GIVE possession HAVE GET LOSE

creation CREATE EXIST DESTROY

These conceptual items, not always expressed by verbs, make up “the notions most likely to become new expressions of BE and HAVE, as well as the semantic ideas most likely to be grammaticalized as auxiliary verbs” (Clancy, 2001, p. 5). Kharms’ manipulation of construals is rooted in these cognitive-semantic categories, and I will show how his untraditional approach to writing partly gains its effect from an awareness of cognitive linguistic play at the syntactic and lexical levels. Clancy’s nexus will serve as the primary analytical tool toward this understanding. Clancy demonstrates the correlation between the two concepts (see Figure 6.1).3 Among the various Slavic languages, Russian features the most

3 Clancy’s model might benefit from reworking in terms of Fauconnier and Turner’s (2003) theory of conceptual blending, but this falls outside the scope of the present contribution.

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complicated semantic map4 for BE/HAVE. Due to similar mapping in meaning, structure, function and a lack of a clear verbal expression for HAVE, the two concepts are often expressed in the same manner. As will be shown, Kharms’ texts, particularly “Blue Notebook №10,” make use of this blending that allows for an expansion of meaning.

existence abstract idea possession

location/ presence/ position absence location availability

auxiliary impersonal auxiliary modality

copula joining idea relationship BE HAVE

Fig. 6.1 Blended Prototype Model (from Clancy, 2001, p. 4)

A historical analysis of the shift from BE to HAVE for all languages shows that the roots of this blended prototype model lie in metonymy and metaphor, the former a particularly critical device in Kharms’ works. An expression for EXISTENCE can appear “by metonymy, reinterpreted as metaphor, from an expression for RHEMATIC POSSESSION” (Koch, 1999, p. 297). Kharms utilizes such a metonymic and metaphoric link throughout “Blue Notebook №10” with reference to body parts and BEING; this cognitive play elevates, if subtly and at the level of the individual words, the meaning of the whole text and endows it with greater philosophical import. It moves POSSESSION into the sphere of EXISTENCE. These are some of the linguistic nuances that Kharms’ Incidents frequently aestheticize.

3. The BE/HAVE nexus and “Blue Notebook №10”

I will now investigate the function of the BE/HAVE nexus in Kharms’ story. “Blue Notebook №10” is Kharms at his most playful and serves as the best example of the sort of cognitive manipulations utilized throughout the cycle. He wrote

4 A graphic representation of all possible meanings associated with a term or concept, e.g. BE or HAVE.

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this well-known text in January 1937 as part of the Blue Notebook (Golubaya tetrad’) and later selected it for inclusion in the Incidents (Sluchai) cycle of 1939. It should be noted that Kharms’ so-called mature works, as opposed to his children’s literature, were for the most part not published in Russia until the advent of glasnost’. His drafts and notebooks, which were preserved by family and friends after his arrest in 1941 remain in varying degrees of (dis)order, but Kharms himself collated the thirty stories and drew up a title page for a theoretical future publication.5 The two versions of the text differ in very few ways, perhaps even by just two words. I will first discuss the general nature of the cognitive play in “Blue Notebook №10,” then move on to the significance of changes between the two versions of the text in conjunction with the BE/HAVE nexus. Finally, I will take up the issue of other related forms of cognitive play that Kharms deploys in his story, including shifts in definiteness and inverted sentence scanning. All of this cognitive play, as will become evident, is linked to the BE/HAVE nexus. Only a few lines long, “Blue Notebook №10” stands among the shortest and certainly most famous of Kharms’ works:

Был один рыжий человек, у которого не было глаз и ушей. У него не было и волос, так что рыжим его называли условно. Говорить он не мог, так как у него не было рта. Носа тоже у него не было. У него не было даже рук и ног. И живота у него не было, и спины у него не было, и хребта у него не было, и никаких внутренностей у него не было. Ничего не было! Так что не понятно, о ком идет речь. Уж лучше мы о нем не будем больше говорить. (Kharms, 1997, p. 330)

There was a redheaded man who had no eyes or ears. He didn’t have hair either, so he was called a redhead arbitrarily. He couldn’t talk because he had no mouth. He didn’t have a nose either. He didn’t even have arms or legs. He had no stomach, he had no back, no spine, and he didn’t have any insides at all. There was nothing! So, we don’t even know who we’re talking about. We’d better not talk about him anymore. (Kharms, 2007, p. 45)

It is a deceptively brief story in which a man exists, and then he does not. When this Incident is examined in conjunction with Clancy’s BE/HAVE nexus,

5 Such an act, given the unlikelihood of Kharms ever being able to publish his stories under the Stalin regime, signifies both his desire to have these stories read in a particular order and the implicit existence of a certain unity to the cycle as a whole.

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however, key nuances can be observed. Kharms begins with the subject: the redheaded man. At the opening of the text the man is complete. He exists, and he possesses certain traits. Kharms has created life through writing. With a few calculated words and several missing limbs, though, everything shifts. Kharms, not without a certain subtle bravado, moves from Clancy’s BECOME to BE to (UNMAKE) in a single sentence. Alternatively, because the BE/HAVE nexus links together conflated concepts expressed by diverse constructions, one could read this as CREATE-EXIST-DESTROY. The lexical expressions of these concepts are limited within the text to the byl and the u nego constructions, but the progression is clear. Kharms moves toward what Matvei Yankelevich calls “annihilation and oblivion” (Yankelevich, 2009, p. 32). He seems to recognize the blend between BE and HAVE and ingeniously uses it to his advantage. Most literally, the redheaded man’s body parts are “not existing” – thus the metonymic line is drawn between BE and HAVE. From a reader’s perspective, the two concepts begin to merge and the absence of a body part slides from simple POSSESSION into the realm of existentialism and the conceptualization of BE. As Clancy has claimed, “the negation of fundamental BEING is simply not expressed lexically and is not a part of our everyday experience of living and interacting with the world” (Clancy, 2001, p. 4). He recognizes that being unable to fill the UNBECOMING category slot for existence feels “rather comforting.” This in itself is a considerably telling comment, as what Kharms accomplishes with his art can be, in fact, exhilaratingly terrifying. A cognitive approach to the absurdist writer allows us to visualize the gap between the world of logic and Kharms’ space of pure order wherein existence is nullified and logic fails to cohere. Where most words fall short, Kharms finds a lexical and syntactic manner in which to express this concept (UNMAKE) that Clancy finds difficult to name precisely – the seemingly contradictory opposite of BEING, of EXISTENCE, of is. The careful reader witnesses the illusory and “undefined” presence of the man’s NON-EXISTENCE through Kharms’ artistic gesture. The exact differences between the two versions of “Blue Notebook №10” remain somewhat unclear due to the inconsistency of published collections. Nonetheless, one thing is certain given the variants and their implications: Kharms was acutely aware of the different construals offered by choices in diction. What I propose below is based on the following distinction:

Blue Notebook version Incidents version (1) Жил один рыжий человек (1b) Был один рыжий человек (2) Ничего у него не было. (2b) Ничего не было!

(1) There lived a redheaded man (1b) There was a readheaded man (2) He didn’t have anything. (2b) There was nothing!

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In regard to the original, the two major differences between Kharms’ drafts illustrate the BE/HAVE blend as concerns the writer’s own intentions, as far as one may say so, rather well. The change from (1) to (1b) or (2) to (2b) modifies the cognitive representation drastically and reveals that cognitive blending was part of Kharms’ “plan” in editing the text. Cognitive Grammar posits that profiling, the process by which an expression’s “specific focus of attention” is derived from its base, is a part of our cognitive organizing of the world and, thus, the way we express what we conceptualize and experience through language (Langacker, 2008, p. 66). Bartmiński likewise stresses the subjective nature of profiling: “The factors which drive profiling are connected with […] subject-oriented categories: someone’s rationality, someone’s knowledge of the world, someone’s system of values and point of view” (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 89). He goes on to say that not only does a human organizing figure remain at the center of profiling, but that an entire complex of “culturally established” elements takes part as well. In other words, an author imbues a text with his or her own ideas while simultaneously drawing upon the traditions (linguistic, cultural, syntactic even) that exist in a language. This allows for further deconstruction of expectations, as is the case in Kharms’ text. When choosing this draft for the Incidents, Kharms placed the redheaded man into a different participatory role – a role in which he lacks any control whatsoever and is subject to the gradual amputation of his body parts. The reader sees this figure, but he is more the textual shell of a man. Craig Hamilton notes that as writers “we can vary the focus of our utterance by putting different participants in different roles” (Hamilton, 2003, p. 4). Precisely so, Peter Stockwell adds, “choosing a patient as the subject (such as in a passive) is a marked expression that requires some special explanatory motivation: defamiliarisation, or evading active responsibility, or encoding secrecy” (Stockwell, 2002, p. 61). In the case of “Blue Notebook №10,” defamiliarization is likely the aim. As a rule, the agent of a standard statement or utterance performs the action, while the patient is the receiver of said action. In the second version of “Blue Notebook №10,” the man is no longer the agent, but the patient and, as such, events happen to him, rather than because of him (Hamilton, 2003, p. 58). He exists in vague terms (“There was”), rather than more concretely and actively (“There lived”). In this story and other Incidents, these techniques – “a manipulation of the reader’s expectations in regard to content, tone and form” (Nakhimovsky, 1982, p. 70) – defamiliarize logical presumptions about language and the standard experience of reading.

4. Scales of definiteness: subject and possession

In conjunction with the BE/HAVE nexus, it will also prove fruitful to consider other forms of cognitive play in Kharms’ story, which will allow us to see how

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Kharms’ language consists of a system of interrelated devices. One such method is linked to Stockwell’s (2002) scale of “definiteness,” according to which the degree of the reader’s familiarity with a text’s subject is tracked. Stockwell states: “Definite subjects (‘The town’, ‘that man’) are generally preferred to indefinites, and specific indefinites (‘a certain Mrs. Jones’, ‘a girl I know’) are preferred to non-specific ones (‘a girl’)” (p. 61). The man in Kharms’ text gradually loses his definiteness, moving from being a so-called “redheaded man” to simply a man and then to the shadow of a person that was once there. And although his lost limbs would seem to distinguish him and give him a certain “definiteness,” this too cannot be, for he is soon transformed into blank, impersonal non-existence. Given these points, Kharms seems to want to present the general concept of MAN. The short text is of course not about any one particular redhead, who in any case is called so only by convention, but the general idea of man who suffers existentially, perhaps because of the divide between the absurd and the so- called “logical” world. Such a sense of “definiteness” can also be observed in the critical difference between (2), in which the man himself “possesses” nothing, and (2b), in which there is simply nothing. It is a slight variation, but for Kharms, a scrupulous writer, each word contributes to a greater meaning. Natal’ya Fateeva, in a study of Kharms’ manipulations of verbal predication for semantic effect, also notes his preoccupation with linguistic play at this level: “Such deviations, irreducible to semantic standards, stimulate a collision of meanings in the text and generate new meanings, based not only on the shift of usual compatibility, but also on an unusual juxtaposition of semantic spaces” (Fateeva, 2006, p. 310).6 At the very least, the version of “Blue Notebook №10” in which “there is nothing” illustrates the totality of the man’s forced disappearing act. If the man possesses nothing, the idea of the man remains; if there is nothing at all, then the man can no longer factor into the equation. It again becomes an existential matter, not one of simple POSSESSION, though the semantic connection between the two in Russian remains clear. The variants illustrate Koch’s metonymic link between POSSESSION and EXISTENCE. Kharms moves from possession of body parts to the non-existence of man, and the BE/HAVE nexus allows him to do so with careful linguistic sleight-of-hand. The progressive lack of body parts is taken to represent a larger non-existence; the man-ness of the redheaded man is lost. Kharms is performing a complex two-fold metonymic operation: the connection between EXISTENCE and POSSESSION inherent in Russian serves to magnify the gravity of the also metonymic connection between the man’s parts and his very conceptualization as MAN. The missing part can no longer define the whole when

6 Unless otherwise noted, translations from the Russian are my own, J.V.

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the man disappears, and as Carrick suggests, the redheaded man is “greater than the sum and the separation of all his parts” (Carrick, 1994, p. 642). By removing the pieces from the entirety, Kharms stakes his claim – in an absurd world, these parts and individual fragments are what truly matter.7 The depth of readers’ construal of Kharms’ text will vary widely depending on the sentence variant at hand. It appears that in preparing this Incident for a theoretical publication, the author hoped to change the reader’s construal into one that more fully acknowledges the existential nature of BE/HAVE, a truly philosophical matter. This can be said with a high degree of certainty. In the margins of the manuscript to “Blue Notebook №10,” Kharms scribbled “against Kant” (1997, p. 474). Hilary Fink notes that Kharms, in line with the general modernist spirit of anti-Kantianism, “proclaimed that the ‘true’ nature of the wor(l)d may only be grasped through the breakdown of strictly rational modes of apprehension, the abandonment of causality, the birth of the absurd” (Fink, 1998, p. 527). The latter version of “Blue Notebook №10” is an enhanced reflection of this deconstructionist approach to writing and points to this polemic with its atypical form and absurdist content. Thanks to linguistic details, “Blue Notebook №10” takes on even more weighted meaning as Kharms makes use of the blended BE/HAVE prototypes. Moreover, it is through such techniques that, as Graham Roberts argues, “Kharms forces us as readers to engage actively with the text, and to re-examine the assumptions which we make in reading” (Roberts, 1997, p. 97). Roberts suggests that Kharms wrote texts that challenged the conception of the writer as the authoritative figure of a text. In particular, he ascribes to this the content and alogical nature of their writings. I would add that central linguistic features, like those involving the BE/HAVE nexus that implicates the reader and forces him/her to actively “co-create” the meaning of the text, play a large role as well.

5. Photograph and film: sentence scanning in “Blue Notebook №10”

Kharms’ cognitive play also involves an inversion of the reader’s natural processes of reading sentences, though this again connects to Clancy’s BE/ HAVE nexus and the way that it is used throughout the story. In what Stockwell calls summary scanning, “attributes are collected into a single coherent gestalt

7 It is these parts that interested Kharms, who saw in the “proposition of a world that is ‘whole,’” a denial of the “essential role played by its ‘parts’” (Fink, 1998, p. 530).

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that constitutes an element.” Sequential scanning, on the contrary, “happens when an event or configuration has to be tracked” (2002, p. 66). The former involves nominals and stative conditions (BE) and the latter active changes to a state (perhaps HAVE – the completion of coming into possession of an object).8 Here is a summarily scanned sentence: “Daniel is tall and dressed like an English dandy.” The man’s attributes (his man-ness, height, and clothes) – and existence – all congeal in a single, motionless image. Sequentially scanned statements such as “Daniel walked along the edge of the Dom knigi balcony in St. Petersburg,” on the other hand, require the reader to visualize motion or change. The difference between the two can be compared to a still photograph and a dynamic film clip, respectively. The bulk of “Blue Notebook№ 10” is made up of existential or attributive statives, which state a condition and should normally undergo summary scanning. Kharms, however, systematically arranges his text in a manner that inverts this cognitive process and puts words and meanings into conflict with one another. The reader is forced to sequentially scan the story of a man losing his body parts without cause. Kharms first states, “There was a redheaded man,” which naturally implies certain prerequisites: a complete anatomy and a concrete existence. Before the sentence is over, however, the situation starts to unravel. It would be one thing to say, “There was a man who did not have eyes or ears.” It is another to begin with a full body and then to delete parts. In doing so, Kharms shifts from what would under normal circumstances be summarily scanned (an image of a man with or without certain body parts) to a progressively smaller picture taken in through sequential scanning. It requires the reader to see things change gradually, rather than as a series of complete gestalts. Arguably, the difference between variants (1) “There lived a redheaded man” and (1b) “There was a redheaded man” also reflects this change. The concept LIFE calls to mind a progression of events that constantly alter the man in one way or another: life as a collection of “incidents” that make up the individual. Thus, LIFE, and the active process of LIVING, is sequentially scanned. BE, on the other hand, is expressed as “there was” (byl) in (1b) – an instance of summary scanning. This construal suggests a more static situation. By changing

8 The notions of sequential and summary scanning, as used by Stockwell, come from Langacker’s model of Cognitive Grammar: Sequential scanning is the mode of processing we employ when watching a motion picture or observing a ball as it flies through the air. The successive states of the conceived event are activated serially and more or less instantaneously, so that the activation of one state begins to decline as that of its successor is initiated... On the other hand, summary scanning is what we employ in mentally reconstructing the trajectory a ball has followed... The component states are activated successively but cumulatively (i.e. once activated they remain active throughout), so that eventually they are all coactivated as a simultaneously accessible whole. (Langacker, 1991, p. 22)

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this single verb, Kharms makes a major cognitive move. The verb “was” serves to accentuate the inverted nature of the scanning that takes place immediately after when the man’s body parts are gradually stripped away. It is once again the connections between BE and HAVE in Kharms’ text that accentuate and even allow for such a development.

6. The reasons for Cognitive Play

We can better understand the purpose of all this cognitive play if we consider Hilary Fink’s three approaches to Kharms’ 1930s prose: “the alienation of man in society, the decomposition of language and subsequent failure of communication, and the general incoherence of a world plunged into the madness of Stalinism” (Fink, 1998, p. 528). I believe that in expressing these themes, among many others, throughout his prose miniatures, Kharms used the more unusual aspects of his language, and a reading of his work through the lens of cognitive ethnolinguistics can offer insight into the results of what has been termed “cognitive play.” Kharms did not wish to shock, but rather to bemuse spectators and defy automatized tendencies in both life and art, especially through writing (Komaromi, 2002, p. 422). As such, Fink is absolutely correct in endowing Kharms’ prose with these broader meanings. The texts that comprise the Incidents cycle deal with the “expression of the absurd split between man and his surrounding world” (Fink, 1998, p. 528), that is, any world that has been castrated through strict everyday logic. In the final analysis, Kharms’ aesthetic and philosophical concerns are reflected in his words. This facet of language is part of Bartmiński’s linguistic worldview, which is “different than the scientific picture of the world” (2009/2012, p. 36). Such a worldview is subjective and permeated with the author’s conceptualization of reality. Moreover, Kharms’ language not only reflects ideas but even allows the author to aestheticize them in stories such as “Blue Notebook №10.” Kharms’ collaborative group, the OBERIU (Union of Real Art), aimed to overcome human logic and its respective idiom by subverting language itself. Aleksandr Kobrinskii has noticed this interest in language as an ontological tool in Kharms’ texts as well as in the mutual concerns of the groups with which he associated:

This suggests that the problem of language as an intermediary between man and the world occupied the other “Chinary,” and they actively discussed it at that time. Anticipating the ideas of Whorf and Wittgenstein, Druskin compared the system of linguistic concepts with a net, with which man covers the world. The net allows for understanding and provides the means for people to communicate with one another, but it also becomes an obstacle to a deeper

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understanding of the world. It is necessary to create a new net in order to see the world anew. Such an understanding, coincidentally, is close to the ideas expressed in the OBERIU declaration – about the necessity to see the world through “naked eyes.” (Kobrinskii, 2009, p. 362)

Kharms inverts readers’ expectations in “Blue Notebook №10” both on a structural level and in the fact that by the end no content remains. He manages to present the world and man in a new light through the cognitive play he wields, showing, as Roberts writes, “how at least certain languages can shape [or] transform reality” (1997, p. 145). This, of course, occupies a central position in Bartmiński’s ethnolinguistic worldview – the creative force of language. The BE/HAVE nexus allows Kharms to address this concern by making use of the semantic link between the two concepts, and the redheaded man’s parts, removed with precision by Kharms the writer-surgeon, come to signify much more than simple possession in a story that ostensibly appears to be about just that, but, instead, delves into the existential core of human life.

7. Beyond “Blue Notebook №10”: cognitive play in the Incidents cycle

What follows here is not a comprehensive analysis of the remaining stories in the cycle through the lens of cognitive linguistics, but instead a step in that direction. This sort of analysis reveals how Kharms’ systematic approach to writing is rooted in an understanding of the cognitive and ethnolinguistic nature of language. Kharms makes deft use of not only the BE/HAVE nexus but also other cognitive strategies in the rest of the Incidents, sometimes resulting in a fascinating meta-literary commentary on the themes of cognitive play elucidated above. BE in Russian has also been linked to SEEMING and verbs of position. I will address these connections, along with other types of cognitive play, in two further stories: An Optical Illusion” (Opticheskii obman) and “The Trunk” (Sunduk). First, the BE/HAVE nexus is frequently expressed through the “position” category: STAND UP–STAND–SIT DOWN/LIE DOWN or, alternatively, SIT DOWN/ LIE DOWN–SIT/LIE–STAND UP (Clancy, 2001, p. 5). Generally, BEING is often rendered through the interaction of an individual upon a given space and how s/he occupies it, whether it be sitting, standing, or lying. In “An Optical Illusion” the character Semyon Semyonovich experiences something quite strange related to this linguistic phenomenon:

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Семен Семенович, надев очки, смотрит на сосну и видит: на сосне сидит мужик и показывает ему кулак. Семен Семенович, сняв очки, видит, что на сосне никто не сидит… (Kharms, 1997, pp. 332-333)

Semyon Semyonovich, having put on his spectacles, looks at a pine tree and this is what he sees: in the pine tree sits a man showing him his fist. Semyon Semyonovich, taking off his spectacles, looks at the pine tree and sees that no one is sitting in the tree. (Kharms, 2007, p. 50)

The action repeats itself several times before Semyon Semyonovich “doesn’t want to believe in this appearance and considers it an optical illusion.” Logically it should be the case that the man in the tree either is there or is not. And yet Kharms challenges this idea, much like he does in “Blue Notebook №10.” Kobrinskii has described how Kharms breaks the law of the excluded middle by “introducing the new condition ‘to be redheaded arbitrarily.’”9 Applying the same sort of analysis to “An Optical Illusion,” we see that the construction is very similar: the existence (“is sitting”) of the muzhik achieves a third option in which a spectator’s choice controls reality. Here, Kharms intuitively connects “sits” (sidit) and “no one is sitting” (nikto ne sidit) to BE and, therefore, EXISTENCE. Sitting and not sitting become synonymous with existence and non-existence. By “considering” the fist-waving muzhik an optical illusion, Semyon Semyonovich disrupts a traditional understanding of the world. The man in the tree occupies the same linguistic and metaphysical space as the redheaded man. This, in fact, may be what Kharms himself called the purity of order, a space devoid of logic.10 Again, the Russian language provides him with the means – at least in part – to express this philosophical idea. Examining the text more broadly, we see that Kharms grants Semyon Semyonovich the power of the writer. In terms of participatory roles, the protagonist becomes an agent in control of the patient (the muzhik) (Hamilton, 2003, p. 58). Hence, Kharms arrives at a meta-commentary on the nature of fiction

9 “For example, in logic there exists the law of the excluded middle. Transferring over this law to the situation depicted by Kharms in ‘Blue Notebook №10,’ it can be said that there is the state ‘to be redheaded’ and there is the state ‘to not be redheaded.’ Kharms transforms the two-valued logic into three-valued, introducing the new state ‘to be redheaded arbitrarily [by convention].’” (Kobrinskii, 2009, p. 417) 10 “Thus arises that which can be named in Kharms’ own words – ‘the purity of order’ [chistota poryadka]. That is, order which does not depend on any outside conditions or connections.” (Kobrinskii, 2009, p. 429)

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and existence. Whereas the writer-narrator of “Blue Notebook №10” controls the obliteration of the redheaded man, in this story one character manipulates another’s reality. Simply by “considering” the event an optical illusion, Semyon Semyonovich has wielded the power of conceptual EXISTENCE. Kharms activates this function through a series of cognitive moves: the use of the inherent link between POSITION and EXISTENCE, an alternation of the muzhik’s presence in the tree and in reality, and finally the opening of yet another glance into a world of absurdity or nonsense (chush’).11 Much of the same sort of cognitive play continues in “The Trunk” (“Sunduk”). Having placed himself in a sealed trunk, the narrator witnesses a fantastic struggle between life and death. The story’s conclusion remains ambiguous with one of the two in the nominative case: “Значит жизнь победила смерть неизвестным для меня способом.” In English, without the aid of case endings, the English translator must make a choice. This passage typically reads: “That means that life defeated death by a method unknown to me” (Kharms, 2007, p. 55). The English is explicit in its construal of the outcome – an issue I will address in the following section. In the original, however, because Kharms renders the long- necked man an uninvolved patient and observer of this battle between life and death, it remains unclear.12 As an example of a slightly different form of cognitive play that Kharms deploys in this text, we may consider Lakoff’s container metaphor, which also represents the man’s experience within the trunk. Inside, he undergoes some sort of transformation by removing himself from logical reality and placing himself in a space where the metaphorical “battle between life and death” is literalized. Friedrich Ungerer and Hans-Jörg Schmid write: “Although metaphor is a conceptual phenomenon, we have access to the metaphors that structure our way of thinking through the language we use” (2006, p. 118). Kharms in this manner uses Russian to construct a world in which metaphor bleeds into reality. The ideas LIFE and DEATH exist within the trunk and the man. They are encapsulated in the trunk by the experiment, while the man always contains the potential for both. Ungerer and Schmid continue: “We think of our minds as containers for ideas” (p. 126). The man then is a metaphorical vessel for the two, which adopt more prototypically agential roles than he. His existence is reduced to this precise moment in which he lacks all control. In this way Kharms suggests that within the container (a body) LIFE and DEATH exist beyond human control.

11 On a further level, we can read this text as commentary of the self-deceptive power of logic and the universal human inability to completely comprehend one’s own self and motivations. 12 Kharms himself noted the ambiguity of his language on the manuscript (Kharms, 1997, p. 480).

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The man’s hands might be forced to move by life and not necessarily by an active desire to live. Death, though, the narrator says, is “naturally…victorious” as if it is a forgone conclusion. Such anthropomorphizing of LIFE and DEATH is not unique. In fact, it is prototypical: LIFE and DEATH as two forces locked in relentless battle. Death takes lives; life favors someone. The multiple cognitive layers Kharms develops in “The Trunk,” however, are exceptional: BE/HAVE blending, container metaphor, agent/patient roles. Kharms deftly places everything, from the existence of the air the man breathes (or does not) to the metaphysical trunk, into question by constantly shifting primary agency among the three parties involved. Moreover, humans as agents typically control ideas, not the other way around. The man only “seems” to understand what has occurred. This verb once again connects with Clancy’s nexus as another expression of BE – things seem to be, seem to exist. The reality of what truly transpires within the trunk remains unknown because there is no solid truth that one may grasp. The man possesses only fallible understanding (kazhetsya), and the trunk creates another instance of the break from the logical world, realized through Kharms’ curious language.

8. Cognitive analysis of Kharms in an Ethnolinguistic Perspective: Translations and the encoding of language

Returning to “Blue Notebook №10,” we may consider the ethnolinguistic implications of the preceding analysis with reference to translations of the text. This will be useful for several reasons. First, it spotlights the dichotomy between Russian as a BE-language and English as a HAVE-language.13 The BE/HAVE nexus, functional in Russian, simply cannot exist in English. Furthermore, a translator’s choices reveal the very ways that we as readers construe a work of literature by opting to focus on one subtext or layer of a work over another. Yankelevich’s collection of translations contains both versions of the story and aligns with the proposed differences elaborated upon earlier. Others, such as Neil Cornwell’s Incidences (Kharms, 2006), either translate (1b)/(2) for the Incidents cycle version or another combination of variants, e.g. (1)/(2b).14 Even translating the cycle’s

13 A Czech translation offers the same HAVE-oriented results: “Byl jednou jeden zrzavý člověk, který neměl oči ani uši… Neměl prostě vůbec nic!” (Charms, 1994, p. 9). 14 This problem is also rampant in Russian editions of the story, which tend to vary widely regardless of which version (Golubaya tetrad’ or Sluchai) is intended for publication.

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title, Sluchai (Случаи), has been problematic; English renderings include: Events, Incidences, Incidents, and Happenings. One can only imagine that Kharms would have been pleased to see such a horde of meaning springing from a single word. In the English translations there is a consistent preference for expressions of HAVE (“He had no X, he had no Y”), and it seems fairly obvious that this would be the case. English, unlike Russian, lacks a way to concisely state what the latter suggests in a sentence such as, “U nego nebylo ruk.” The ambiguity and complicated subtexts are quite literally lost in translation. The Russian can be interpreted as the man possessed no hands, there were no hands existing (near him), or even all at once. The task of the English translator, then, is to determine which meaning – and thus construal – is most vital to preserving the intent of the text, while maintaining the brevity and minimalism of Kharms’ language. This highly complex linguistic task, of course, aligns with Bartmiński’s understanding of the linguistic worldview as “a language-entrenched interpretation of reality, which can be expressed in the form of judgements about the world, people, things or events. It is an interpretation, not a reflection” (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 23). The language Kharms uses in his texts, particularly “Blue Notebook №10,” shows how both writer and reader conceptualize reality through language. A single difference in diction can contribute to a major semantic shift. In this way, Bartmiński notes how the “subject” acts “as the prime experiencing, conceptualising and coding authority” (p. 222). Kharms then pushes his reader in a certain direction with his linguistic choices, and the cognitive processes at work help disclose the larger thematic issues he wishes to explore. Using a cognitive and ethnolinguistic approach allows us to see how Kharms’ language in fact acts less like a mirror and proclaims its own system of devices and referents. It brings together culturally relevant expectations (literary, linguistic, and so on) precisely in order to disrupt and challenge them, and it provides both writer and reader with the power of interpretation.

9. Conclusion

Vladimir Nabokov said that readers should feel good literature as an indescribable tingle in the spine. He proposes reading as not entirely a cognitive task based in brain function, but one that has a more physical, tangible effect – the “highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art” (Nabokov, 1980, p. 65). But the good reader can also sense great literature elsewhere. Kharms, I believe, is felt in the gut. His prose produces the same feeling on the reader as the shift in inertia does on the rider of a roller coaster. Bartmiński champions the “subject,” who is “experienced empirically,” as central to cognitive ethnolinguistics and as long ignored by structural linguistics. This, in fact, lies at the heart of the present analysis. Kharms’ language falls into a

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mutually dependent relationship with the reader. As it challenges us with odd semantics and atypical processes, we interpret it strangely. Without typical grounded causality or a logical reality in Kharms’ texts, we are left with the floor falling out below our feet, plunging toward a hitherto unfamiliar and overwhelmingly disconcerting plane of understanding. His cognitive inversions play a large role in how a reader processes the stories. A better understanding of these elements of Kharms’ Russian can help provide more complete insight into his literary and thematic aims. Though we are not bound to read the Incidents in any one specific way, the manner in which Kharms constructed the cycle leads us down certain paths, at times alogical or circular, that highlight his philosophical concerns and observations.

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References

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (2009/2012). Aspects of Cognitive Ethnolinguistics. Ed. Jörg Zinken. Sheffield and Oakville, CT: Equinox.

Carrick, Neal. (1994). Daniil Kharms and the art of negation. The Slavonic and East European Review, 72.4, 622-643.

Carrick, Neal. (1995). A familiar story: Insurgent narratives and generic refugees in Daniil Kharms’s “The Old Woman.” The Modern Language Review, 90.3, 707-721.

Charms, Daniil. (1994). Dobytku smíchu netřeba. Trans. Martin Hnilo. Praha: Argo.

Clancy, Steven J. (2001). Semantic maps for BE and HAVE in Slavic. Glossos, 1, 1-14.

Clancy, Steven J. (2005). The conceptual nexus of BE and HAVE: A semantic network of BE, HAVE, and their neighbors. Glossos, 5, 1-27.

Fateeva, Natal’ya. (2006). Glagol’naya predikatsiya kak osnova pereklyuchenii semanticheskikh prostranstv v poezii D. Kharmsa. Russian Literature, 60.3-4, 309- 324.

Fauconnier, Gilles, & Turner, Mark. (2003). The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books.

Fink, Hilary L. (1998). The Kharmsian absurd and the Bergsonian comic: Against Kant and causality. Russian Review, 57.4, 526-538.

Hamilton, Craig. (2003). A Cognitive Grammar of “Hospital Barge” by Wilfred Owen. In Joanna Gavins & Gerard Steen (Eds.), Cognitive Poetics in Practice (pp. 55-64). London: Routledge.

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Kharms, Daniil Ivanovich. (1997). Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. Vol. 2. Sankt- Peterburg: Akademicheskii proekt.

Kharms, Daniil Ivanovich. (2001). Polnoe sobranie sochinenii: Neizdannyi Kharms: Traktaty i stat’i, pis’ma, Dopolnenia k t. 1-3. Sankt-Peterburg: Akademicheskii proekt.

Kharms, Daniil Ivanovich. (2006). Incidences. Trans. Neil Cornwell. London: Serpent’s Tail.

Kharms, Daniil Ivanovich. (2007). Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writing of Daniil Kharms. Trans. Matvei Yankelevich. New York: Duckworth.

Kharms, Daniil Ivanovich, & Vvendensky, Alexander. (1997). The Oberiu Manifesto. In The Man with the Black Coat: Russia’s Literature of the Absurd. Trans. George Gibian. Evanston, IL: North Western University Press.

Kobrinskii, Aleksandr. (2009). Daniil Kharms. Moskva: Molodaya gvardiya.

Koch, Peter. (1999). Cognitive aspects of semantic change and polysemy: The semantic space of BE/HAVE. In Andreas Blank & Peter Koch (Eds.), Historical Semantics and Cognition (pp. 279-305). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Komaromi, Ann. (2002). Daniil Charms and the art of absurd life-creation. Russian Literature, 52.4, 419-437.

Langacker, Ronald W. (1991). Concept, Image, and Symbol. The Cognitive Basis of Grammar. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Langacker, Ronald W. (2008). Cognitive Grammar. A Basic Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Nabokov, Vladimir. (1980). Lectures on Literature. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

Nakhimovsky, Alice Stone. (1982). Laughter in the Void: an Introduction to the Writings of Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedenskii. Wien: Wiener Slawistischer Alamanach.

Roberts, Graham. (1997). The Last Soviet Avant-garde: OBERIU – Fact, Fiction, Metafiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Stockwell, Peter. (2002). Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction. London: Routledge.

Taylor, John R. (2002). Cognitive Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ungerer, Friedrich, & Schmid, Hans-Jörg. (2006). An Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics. New York: Longman.

Yankelevich, Matvei. (2009). Introduction. In Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms, by Daniil Kharms, trans. Matvei Yankelevich (pp. 11- 40). New York: Duckworth.

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Part II THE COGNITIVE DEFINITION

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Chapter 7 Polish zwierzęta ‘animals’ and jabłka ‘apples’: an ethnosemantic inquiry

Anna Wierzbicka Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

1. Introduction

Jerzy Bartmiński (2009/2012) argues that a key project for ethnolinguistics is to explicate the cultural knowledge encoded in certain layers of the vocabulary of a given language. Vocabulary, in his view, occupies a privileged position in ethnolinguistic research, as it constitutes a classificatory network for the social experience of people speaking a given language. Bartmiński attaches special importance to the general patterns of conceptual organization of lexico-semantic fields, but he also pays much attention to the semantic and cultural content of many individual words. A key analytic tool for him is what he calls the “cognitive definition”: “a cognitive definition aims at representing socio-culturally established and linguistically entrenched knowledge, its categorization and valuation” (2009/2012, p. 67). Fully acknowledging the need to distinguish between the linguistic lexicon and the encyclopedic lexicon, Bartmiński emphasizes the importance of understanding the cultural knowledge embedded in word meanings and distinguishing “scientific knowledge” from “folk knowledge” transmitted through language itself. An interpretive perspective consistent with the competence of the users of a given language can, in his opinion, bring into the daylight the deep relationships between language and culture: the meanings of words contain a culturally shaped interpretation of the world, and definitions should elucidate this interpretation. I entirely agree with these thoughts and postulates. Despite the fact that we work in different fields, from different viewpoints, in different disciplinary contexts, and with different methodologies, I consider our approaches to be complementary and the directions of our research to be convergent. In this spirit, I make an attempt to explicate, in this paper, aspects of the folk cultural knowledge embedded in the meanings of the Polish words zwierzęta ‘animals’ and jabłka ‘apples.’ I studied these words, or their English and Russian counterparts, in various earlier works (starting with my 1985 book Lexicography and Conceptual Analysis and ending with the Russian 2011 volume

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Semanticheskie Universalii i Bazisnye Kontsepty). Here, I try to look at them anew, focusing, in particular, on the methodological questions addressed by Bartmiński in his works.

2. Zwierzęta ‘animals’: a superordinate category

How does one explicate the folk knowledge embedded in such a seemingly simple word as zwierzęta? What does this word mean in colloquial Polish? Obviously, one can also ask: why explicate such words at all? Don’t they mean the same thing in all languages? Well, no, they don’t. While, admittedly, the English word animals and the Russian word zhivotnye are semantically very close to the Polish word zwierzęta, the German word Tiere differs from it considerably. For example, in German, one can say in reference to a beetle or a caterpillar: du hast irgendein Tier auf dem Kragen, while in Polish one couldn’t say in the same situation: ?masz jakieś zwierzę na kołnierzu (“you’ve got an animal on your collar”); though, one could say, as a joke, masz jakąś bestię na kołnierzu (“you’ve got a beast on your collar”). Thus, the Polish word zwierzęta is not the same as the German Tiere, to say nothing of words such as kuyu in the Australian language Warlpiri: kuyu refers to all edible living creatures that are a potential source of meat, including birds – but only edible ones (cf. Wierzbicka 1996, chpts. 11 and 12). The influential dictionary of Polish edited by Witold Doroszewski (SJP, 1958- 1969) offers the following definition of zwierzę (the singular of zwierzęta): “a living creature feeding exclusively on foods of organic origin; colloquially: a mammal (normally not used of man).” From an ethnolinguistic point of view, a valuable aspect of this definition is the attempt it makes to distinguish scientific terminology and classification from colloquial language. “A living creature feeding exclusively on foods of organic origin” can surely be a bird or a fish or an insect (though it is not clear what living creatures might feed on foods of inorganic origin), but in colloquial use, zwierzęta are indeed primarily “mammals” and indeed “mammals” other than humans. The conviction that zwierzę refers primarily to creatures which in scientific language are designated as ssaki ‘mammals’ is reflected in many linguistic facts. For example, book titles such as Zwierzęta i ptaki Australii (“The Animals and Birds of Australia”) indicate that, in colloquial language, birds are not considered by Polish speakers to be zwierzęta. Yet, the word ssak ‘mammal’ itself belongs to scientific terminology rather than colloquial language, and many people (including children) who often use the word zwierzęta do not have the word ssaki in their vocabularies at all. So the concept SSAK/MAMMAL is a scientific concept and, as such, cannot be part of the folk concept of ZWIERZĘ/ANIMAL.

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At the same time, the colloquial use of the word zwierzę suggests that there is no clear-cut boundary between “zwierzęta” and other types of creatures. For example, the use of this word in reference to crocodiles seems much more acceptable than its use in reference to frogs. Frogs, in Polish speakers’ minds, are “creatures” of a certain kind, but not “zwierzęta,” while crocodiles can, at a pinch, be regarded as “zwierzęta” (though more distant from the prototype of the category than goats or bears). Trying to give an account of the folk intuitions associated with the word zwierzę, I propose the following point of departure (in the newest version of the explication of this word):

zwierzęta ‘animals’: multi-categoriality and an anthropocentric view

living creatures of many kinds they have bodies of many kinds people can think about them like this: “their bodies are like people’s bodies, not like the bodies of creatures of many other kinds”

According to this interpretation, the basis for the concept of ZWIERZĘ, on which all other aspects of folk knowledge and popular thinking about animals are built, is multi-categoriality (“living creatures of many kinds”) on the one hand and, on the other, a general similarity to people in terms of anatomy. In people’s eyes, the body of an animal roughly resembles a human body. The most important and the most unconventional aspect of the proposed foundation for the “cognitive definition”1 of the word zwierzęta is the radical simplicity of the language: all the words used in these six introductory lines are very simple and indefinable (see Table of semantic primes in Appendix I). Some commentary is needed here for the word creature (Pol. stworzenie), which may seem semantically complex. However, a comparison with English already suggests that, in fact, the meaning of this word is simpler than it might seem at first glance. In the English explication of the word animal, one might say living things (literally translated into Polish as żywe rzeczy) instead of creatures (Polish stworzenia). However, in Polish, the collocation ?żywe rzeczy is unacceptable even though one can say in the singular coś żywego ‘a living thing,’ lit. ‘something alive.’ One may thus suppose that in Polish, żywe stworzenie does

1 Although Wierzbicka’s “cognitive definition” differs from Bartmiński’s in details (cf. in this volume: Bartmiński, Niebrzegowska-Bartmińska, or Prorok & Głaz), the two notions are based on compatible basic assumptions about language and Bartmiński readily acknowledges being inspired by Wierzbicka’s approach. [editors’ note]

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not differ in meaning from the expression coś żywego, i.e. in combination with the attribute “living,” the word stworzenie ‘creature’ adds nothing, semantically, to the concept of COŚ/RZECZ/THING. Bartmiński (2009/2012) stresses how important the choice of the superordinate category (genus proximum) is to the cognitive definition:

It is important in defining words to establish the point of departure, i.e. the superordinate category to which a given object is assigned and in terms of which it is characterized. […] If the dictionary definition is to have a linguistic nature, to reflect the understanding of the object by the speaker and to contribute to the reconstruction of linguistic worldview, it must respect the colloquial conceptualization. (p. 29)

I fully agree with the above remarks. In my opinion, it is “creatures,” and not “mammals” (as Doroszewski’s dictionary suggests) that constitutes such a superordinate category in the case of the word zwierzęta. According to the popular worldview, zwierzęta are basically at the same level as ptaki ‘birds,’ ryby ‘fish,’ and owady ‘insects’: they are all different kinds of “creatures” (“living creatures”). Sometimes, however, one word is not enough to express a superordinate category (in a justified way). “Living creatures” may indeed be a justified superordinate category for fish (ryby) and birds (ptaki). In the case of “zwierzęta,” however, multicategoriality and anatomical similarity to humans no doubt also belong to that “point of departure” that Bartmiński refers to. The assertion that “ryby” (or “ptaki”) are “one kind of living creatures” sounds reasonable and not counterintuitive in Polish, unlike the assertion that “zwierzęta” are “one kind of living creatures” because, from the perspective of speakers, “zwierzęta” are “living creatures of many kinds” and not “one kind of living creatures.” In the language of Polish-speaking children, the words ryby ‘fish’ orrybki ‘little fish’ and ptaki ‘birds’ or ptaszki ‘little birds’ probably appear sooner than the words pstrąg ‘trout’ or wróbel ‘sparrow.’ The word zwierzęta, on the other hand, probably appears later than pies ‘dog’ or piesek ‘doggy’ and kot ‘cat’ or kotek ‘kitten.’ This issue obviously requires further research as I am only making an intuitive judgement here. If this observation is correct, however, “living creatures of many kinds” seems more suitable as a superordinate category for “zwierzęta” than “one kind of living creatures” does. Yet, the polytypicity of a superordinate category requires a common denominator. Also “owady” (insects) are probably “living creatures of different kinds” rather than “one kind of living creatures,” but in this case the common denominator is different than for “zwierzęta”: “owady” are very small and they can fly (not very high above the ground). In the case of “zwierzęta” size is less important than for insects because all Polish speakers know that “zwierzęta”

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can be very large (like elephants) and very small (like mice). I believe that what all “zwierzęta” have in common conceptually is mainly the general similarity of their bodies to human bodies. For comparison, I will provide the first sections of the explications of the words ptaki, owady and pszczoły ‘bees’ (these are not complete explications but only their first sections).

ptaki ‘birds’

living creatures of one kind there are many kinds of creatures of this kind people can think about them like this: “they can fly, they live in places above the ground”

owady ‘insects’

living creatures of many kinds people can think about them like this: “they are very small, they can fly, they live near the ground”

pszczoły ‘bees’

living creatures of one kind people can think about them like this: “they are very small, they can fly, they make one kind of thing, this thing is very sweet”

As evidenced by these partial explications, “owady” are similar to “zwierzęta” in their multicategoriality (“living creatures of many kinds”), while “ptaki” are, above all, “one kind of creatures.” Of course, it is a known fact that there are many kinds of birds, but this knowledge is, as it were, superimposed on the basic categorization of birds as creatures of one kind. I have already mentioned that in children’s language the word ptaki or ptaszki probably appears before words such as wróble or jaskółki, while the word zwierzęta probably appears later than words such as pies, kot, or krowa ‘cow.’ Similarly, the word owady probably appears later than pszczoły or muchy ‘flies’ (I provide a partial explication of the word pszczoły here for comparison: it only mentions living creatures “of one kind,” and neither the first nor the following lines mention “many kinds”). It should be noted that the words ground, fly and sweet, used in the explications, are not indefinable, but they are simple and commonly used “semantic molecules.” Their explications can be found in publications such as Wierzbicka (1996) or Goddard and Wierzbicka (2007).

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3. Environment and mode of life

Besides the general similarity of their bodies to human bodies, one of the most conceptually conspicuous traits of “zwierzęta” is that, like humans, they live on land (not in water like fish, not above the ground like birds, not in the ground like worms). Therefore, the second section of the proposed explication of zwierzęta reads as follows:

Where zwierzęta live

These creatures live in places of many kinds. People can think about it like this: “they live in places where parts of their bodies can touch the ground at many times, just like parts of people’s bodies touch the ground at many times.”

The problem of the similarity between certain body parts of “zwierzęta” and certain parts of people’s bodies is elaborated in the following part of the explication, which concerns parts of animal bodies that particularly attract human attention. These parts are primarily the head and legs (resembling the human head and legs) and the tail (strikingly dissimilar to any part of the human body).

4. Body parts

The head of an animal resembles the human head not only in terms of anatomy but also in terms of its function: it is no doubt owing to the appearance and movements of animals’ heads that people are inclined to ascribe to animals the capacity to have many feelings. What is more, it is thanks to one part of the head (resembling the human mouth) that animals can produce sounds that bring to mind human speech. This can be presented in the explication in the following way:

The head of zwierzęta

a. Many parts of their bodies are like parts of people’s bodies. b. One of these parts is the head. c. One part of their head is like people’s mouth. d. Because the bodies of these creatures have this part they can make sounds, like people can make sounds with their mouth.

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Legs or paws are also very significant for the popular notion of animals. According to this popular notion, an animal usually has four legs, two at the front and two at the back. Of course, quadrupedalism does not apply to all animals; for example, you can think of monkeys or kangaroos as having just a pair of “legs” (and a pair of “arms”). The popular notion, however, is that “zwierzęta,” generally, have four body parts comparable to legs; these are parts that touch the ground many times when an animal moves (in a normal manner) in order to be in another place.

The legs of zwierzęta

Some parts of their bodies are like people’s legs. When these creatures want to be in another place after some time, they can do something with these body parts, like people do something many times when they want to be in another place after some time. When people think about these body parts of these creatures, they can think about them like this: “two such parts are at the front of the body, and two are at the back.” At the same time, people can know that the bodies of some kinds of these creatures are not like this.

The most conspicuous body part of animals that does not have a corresponding part in the human body is the tail: located at the rear of the body, elongated, and constantly moving.

The tail of zwierzęta

One part of the body of these creatures is not like any part of people’s bodies. This part is at the back of the body. This part is long. This part of the body of such a creature can move when the creature wants it.

5. Sex and birth

Besides the general similarity to people in terms of anatomy and terrestrial mode of life, animals are strikingly similar to people in terms of sex, birth, and care given by the “mother” to the newly born offspring. Everyone who knows the word zwierzęta, knows that animals, like people, have two kinds of bodies and, therefore, an animal can be either a male (samiec) or a female (samica). It is true that the words samiec (or samczyk) and samica

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(or samiczka) also apply to birds but the psychological significance of this distinction is incomparably greater in relation to animals than to birds (and even greater than in the case of other kinds of creatures), as indicated by the common lexical and even grammatical distinctions lew ‘lion’ vs. lwica ‘lioness,’ tygrys ‘tiger’ vs. tygrysica ‘tigress,’ lis ‘fox’ vs. lisica ‘vixen’ (not to mention words like suka ‘bitch,’ kocur ‘tomcat,’ baran ‘ram,’ byk ‘bull,’ or maciora ‘sow.’ Among domestic poultry, we differentiate betweenkogut ‘rooster’ and kura ‘hen,’ kaczor ‘drake’ and kaczka ‘duck,’ gąsior ‘gander’ and gęś ‘goose,’ but the scope of these distinctions is limited and, in principle, does not include wildfowl. For example, there is no feminine form of words denoting a female vulture, eagle, sparrow, although there is the word gołębica ‘hen pigeon/dove.’ In the explication of zwierzęta, the division into two different sexes (i.e. the distinction between males and females) can be presented in the following way:

The sex of zwierzęta

Living creatures of all these kinds have bodies of two kinds, as people have bodies of two kinds. Some parts of the bodies of one of these two kinds are like some parts of men’s bodies. Some parts of the bodies of the other of these two kinds are like some parts of women’s bodies.

Again, it must be emphasised that, semantically, “men” and “women” are not primes but universal semantic molecules. This means that these words are not indefinable but they have semantic equivalents in all languages and in all languages they serve as components for building the meanings of many other words. (Explications of these words can be found in Goddard and Wierzbicka, 2013.) The distinction between two kinds of animal bodies, comparable to the bodies of men and women, is closely linked to the image of a family group composed of the animal “mother” and her newly born “young.” The significance of this image in popular thinking about animals is also reflected in lexical and word-formation facts. Also in this respect, “zwierzęta” differ from birds and, even more so, from fish. Apart from kurczęta ‘chicks,’ kaczęta ‘ducklings,’ and orlęta ‘eaglets,’ there aren’t too many words denoting baby birds of a specific kind. In relation to zwierzęta, on the other hand, the derivation of such forms is relatively productive. This primarily, but not exclusively, applies to domestic animals, cf. kocięta ‘kittens,’ szczenięta ‘puppies,’ prosięta ‘piglets,’ cielęta ‘calves,’ koźlęta ‘kids,’ jagnięta ‘lambs,’ źrebięta ‘foals,’ lwięta ‘lion cubs,’ wilczęta ‘wolf cubs.’ It seems that the key factor here is the image of the animal mother with her young: if the young of a given species are often accompanied by their mother and people are accustomed to such a sight, the form with the suffix -ęta is usually a well-documented lexical fact.

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In the explication of zwierzęta, this aspect of popular thinking can be presented as follows:

The young of zwierzęta

People can think about these living creatures like this: “Because these living creatures have bodies of these two kinds, small creatures of all these kinds are born the way that people are born. Before such a small creature is born, its body is inside a big creature of the same kind for some time, like the body of a child is inside the body of the child’s mother for some time. For some time after birth, such a small creature is often with this big creature of the same kind, like a child is with its mother for some time after birth. During this time, this big creature of the same kind can do many good things for this small creature, like a child’s mother can do good things for the child after it is born.”

6. Tame animals (Zwierzęta Oswojone) vs. Wild Animals (Zwierzęta Dzikie)

An important part of folk knowledge and popular thinking about animals is that they can be roughly divided into tame animals and wild animals. English emphasizes the distinction between farm animals and wild animals. In Polish the category of farm animals (zwierzęta gospodarskie) is not so distinct, and wild animals (zwierzęta dzikie) are rather contrasted with tame animals (zwierzęta oswojone). However, the very idea that “zwierzęta” can be divided into “wild” and other animals is also present in Polish popular thinking. This is not a clear-cut division by any means. It seems that the main basis for the contrast is living in places where people live or places that are remote from people. In the explication, this aspect of “zwierzęta” can be presented as follows:

Relation to people

People can think about these creatures like this: “There are many kinds of these creatures. Creatures of some of these kinds live in places where people live. People want creatures of some of these kinds to live in these places because this is good for people.

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Creatures of some of the other kinds live far from places where people live. They do not want to live near places where people live. At the same time people do not want these creatures to live near places where people live because creatures of some of these kinds can do very bad things to people.”

7. How do people Think About Animals/“Zwierzęta”?

To a certain extent, everything discussed so far has been an answer to the question: how do people think about animals? However, something very important pertaining to the subject has not been said yet. It has already been mentioned how animal bodies are similar to people’s bodies, how the distinction between male and female animals resembles the distinction between men and women, how the way animals are born resembles the birth of children, and how young animals need their “mother’s” care similarly to small children. So what are the main differences between animals and people, apart from the tail, four legs, and the variety of species? There is no doubt that, from the perspective of popular thinking about animals, the key differences concern what people and animals do, particularly in terms of thinking, speech, and knowledge. This does not mean that we cannot see similarities in the behaviour and psyche of animals and people. We can. But against the background of these similarities, there are very distinctive differences, from the human perspective, and due to these differences, people are not a kind of “animal” in popular thinking.

How people think about “zwierzęta”

People think about these creatures like this: “These creatures do many things like people, these creatures feel many things like people.” At the same time people think about them like this: “These creatures cannot do many things like people can do many things. These creatures cannot think like people can think. These creatures cannot speak like people can speak. These creatures cannot know many things like people can know many things.”

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8. Complete explication of the word zwierzęta

zwierzęta

category living creatures of many kinds they have bodies of many kinds people can think about them like this: “Their bodies are like people’s bodies, not like the bodies of creatures of many other kinds”

where they live These creatures live in places of many kinds. People can think about it like this: “they live in places where parts of their bodies can touch the ground at many times like parts of people’s bodies touch the ground at many times.”

body – head Many parts of their bodies are like parts of people’s bodies. One of these parts is the head. One part of their head is like people’s mouth. Because the bodies of these creatures have this part they can make sounds like people can make sounds with their mouth. – legs Some parts of their bodies are like people’s legs. When these creatures want to be in another place after some time, they can do something with these body parts, like people do something many times when they want to be in another place after some time. When people think about these body parts of these creatures, they can think about them like this: “two such parts are at the front of the body, and two are at the back.” At the same time, people may know that the bodies of some kinds of these creatures are not like this. – tail One part of the body of these creatures is not like any part of people’s bodies. This part is at the back of the body. This part is long. This part of the body of such a creature can move when the creature wants it.

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sex Living creatures of all these kinds have bodies of two kinds, like people have bodies of two kinds. Some parts of the bodies of one of these two kinds are like some parts of men’s bodies. Some parts of the bodies of the other of these two kinds are like some parts of women’s bodies.

young of animals People can think about these living creatures like this: “Because these living creatures have bodies of these two kinds, small creatures of all these kinds are born the way that people are born. Before such a small creature is born, its body is inside a big creature of the same kind for some time, like the body of a child is inside the body of the child’s mother for some time. For some time after birth, such a small creature is often with this big creature of the same kind, like a child is with its mother for some time after birth. During this time, this big creature of the same kind can do many good things for this small creature, like a child’s mother can do good things for the child after it is born.”

relation to people People can think about these creatures like this: “There are many kinds of these creatures. Creatures of some of these kinds live in places where people live. People want creatures of some of these kinds to live in these places because this is good for people. Creatures of some of the other kinds live far from places where people live. They do not want to live near places where people live. At the same time people do not want these creatures to live near places where people live because creatures of some of these kinds can do very bad things to people.”

how people think about animals People think about these creatures like this: “These creatures do many things like people, these creatures feel many things like people.” At the same time people think about them like this: “These creatures cannot do many things like people can do many things. These creatures cannot think like people can think. These creatures cannot speak like people can speak. These creatures cannot know many things like people can know many things.”

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9. Methodological questions

The proposed “cognitive definition” of the word zwierzęta must bring to mind a lot of methodological questions. It is impossible to discuss all such questions here. Answers to some of them can be found in my book Semantics: Primes and Universals (1996) and in an earlier book Lexicography and Conceptual Analysis (1985), as well as in both editions of Cliff Goddard’s Semantic Analysis (1998; 2011). In the present study, I would like to concentrate primarily on the key question of arbitrariness, or non-arbitrariness, of this type of “cognitive definitions.” The fact that Goddard’s and my works give different versions of principally the same explications may seem to undermine their credibility. Although in Wierzbicka (1985) I did not give a full explication of the word animal, I did mention that this concept corresponded to the category “life form” introduced into cognitive anthropology by Brent Berlin (1992), and that it was at the same level of categorization as bird and fish. In both Wierzbicka (1985) and (1996) I assume that the superordinate category for “animals” is “a kind of creature.” The same superordinate categorization can be found in my explication of the Russian word zhivotnye in my 2011 book Semanticheskie Universalii i Bazisnye Kontsepty; that explication, however, differs in many other respects from the explication of the Polish word zwierzęta proposed here. With respect to superordinate categorization, the explication proposed here is consistent with the explication of the English word animals published also in Goddard (2011). However, Goddard’s explication departs from the one proposed here as early as the second line: “many parts of their bodies are like parts of people’s bodies.” What is at issue here, however, is neither the semantic differences among the English word animals, the Russian word zhivotnye, and the Polish zwierzęta, nor a difference of opinion between me and Goddard. On the contrary, we have achieved, at each stage of work in this field, a provisional consistency of analysis. Our analysis develops and is modified under the influence of new arguments, new material, and new analytic techniques both in this field and in other fields that affect the analysis of zwierzęta/zhivotnye/animals. The search for an optimal, maximally objective and justified analysis is a long-term heuristic process that usually requires dialogue, debate, and repeated alterations and amendments. We are deeply convinced that this long-lasting heuristic process is neither a question of groping in the dark nor a question of the subjective, and changeable, preferences of different researchers, but that it is an objective and justifiable progress. A similar extended heuristic process is illustrated, I believe, by changes in the ethno-semantic interpretation of the word jabłka ‘apples,’ which is the topic of the next, very brief part of the present study. This time, let me start with the explication.

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10. Explication of the word jabłka ‘apples’

jabłka

kind/species Things of one kind. People eat things of this kind.

Things of this kind grow on trees. All things of this kind grow on trees of one kind. This kind of tree is called “apple tree.”

where people can get them These things grow on trees at the same time of the year. People do some things in some places because they want trees of this kind to grow in these places. They want this because they want there to be things of this kind for people to eat. After these things have grown on trees for some time, they are good to eat. At that time people can pick them from the tree. If people don’t pick them, after some time they fall to the ground.

size When someone is eating a thing of this kind, this someone often holds this thing with one hand This hand can be touching this thing on many sides at the same time. This someone can’t hold this thing with two fingers when they are eating it.

shape When someone sees these things from some sides, they can think about them like this: “Two places are not like all the other places. One of these places is far from the other. The place in the middle of these two places is below other parts of these places. In the middle of one of these two places there is something small, thin, and long; this something is hard. In the middle of the other of these two places there is something not like this; this something is very small.”

colour/ripeness When things of this kind grow on trees, before they are good to eat they are green.

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When they are good to eat, they can be red, they can be yellow, they can be green. Often people think about these things like this: “If they are red, they are very good to eat.” The parts inside are white.

How people eat them

– firmness Things of this kind are not soft, at the same time, they are not very hard. When people bite them, they can feel something good because of this. When people eat them, they can often hear something because of it.

– skin People can eat these things with the skin, if they want. Their skin is smooth, it is thin. Inside things of this kind, in the middle, there is a part with very small hard parts. People don’t eat this part.

– taste People can think about things of this kind like this: “When these things are good to eat, they can be sweet, they can be sour, they cannot be very sweet, they cannot be very sour.”

11. Discussion of the changes in the successive analyses of jabłka

A first, and very long, analysis of the concept associated with the word apples was published in Wierzbicka (1985). A considerably altered, but also very long explication of the same (or a very similar) concept embedded in the Russian word yabloki can be found in Wierzbicka (2011). The explication of the Polish word jabłka presented here again differs in many points from the explication of the word yabloki, and, again, what is at issue are not the differences between the Russian language and the Polish language, but the methodological progress that has been made in cultural semantics based on NSM theory over the last few years. The English version of the Russian explication can be found in the Appendix. It is easy to see that the explication presented here, though long, is not as long as the previous ones. The theoretical basis for this reduction is mainly the theory of semantic molecules that has been developed in the recent years.

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The explications presented in Wierzbicka (1985) generally used relatively simple words, which, however, did not come from any closed list of admissible defining concepts. While the list of indefinables was closed (though every few years it underwent certain changes), the list of words used to explicate folk knowledge was open, and so, not confined within any limits. Only over the last few years did research in the field of NSM semantics advance sufficiently to make possible attempts at constructing closed, methodologically well-grounded lists of “semantic molecules.” In his book Semantic Analysis (2nd. ed., 2011), Cliff Goddard gives a list of nearly two hundred molecules, which, as shown by the experience of NSM- based semantic analysis, play the role of building blocks in the structure of the English lexicon, and a similar set could be justified for Polish. It is not yet a full or a final list, however. A subset of this set of molecules are probably universal molecules. There are presumably at least 20 of those, maybe a few more. They include the concepts MEN, WOMEN, and CHILDREN, already mentioned here. They also include body part molecules (HANDS/ARMS, MOUTH, HEAD, LEGS, FINGERS, as well as TAIL), some physical descriptors (e.g., ROUND), environment-related concepts (e.g., SKY, GROUND, SUN, FIRE, WATER, DAY, NIGHT), and some names of actions (for instance, HOLD) and processes (for instance, GROW). Constructing the newest explication of the folk concept associated with the word jabłka, I tried to make use, as far as possible, of the universal molecules, and to adhere to the molecules of the Polish language justified elsewhere. This heuristic principle allowed me to eliminate elements such as “branch,” “attached,” “cook,” “sugar,” and “juice,” which were unconvincing and inadequate from other points of view. It is impossible to discuss in this paper all the other criteria for deciding what elements of folk knowledge should be included in an explication and which should not. Here, I put special emphasis on the standardization of the language of explication and the implications of the theory of semantic molecules for the practice of ethnosemantic analysis, because these things are new. Still in force are the criteria discussed in earlier works on this topic (starting from Wierzbicka 1985 and ending with Goddard 2011). These criteria include, above all, the folk (and not scientific) character of an explication, its internal logic and coherence, and grounding in a body of evidence: lexical, phraseological, proverbial, and ethnographic, in the broad sense of the word. Such evidence for the semantics of jabłka is provided, for instance, by the words ogryzek ‘apple core’ and jabłecznik ‘apple pie,’ the phrases jabłka pieczone ‘baked apples,’ jabłka suszone ‘dried apples’ and placek z jabłkami ‘apple pie,’ proverbs such as niedaleko pada jabłko od jabłoni (“the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree”), the lyrics of folk songs, such as the ones below, and other data:

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Czerwone jabłuszko przekrajane na “A little red apple, cut four ways, krzyż, czemu ty dziewczyno krzywo na mnie why do you, lassie, look at me patrzysz? askance.”

Koło mego ogródeczka zakwitała “Near my little garden, there bloomed jabłoneczka, a little apple tree, bielusieńko zakwitała czerwone it bloomed in pure white and had jabłuszka miała. little red apples.”

Also binding are the semantic-grammatical tests such as the ones I discussed, among others, in the article with the provocative title “Apples are not ‘a kind of fruit’” (Wierzbicka, 1984). In Doroszewski’s dictionary (SJP, 1958-1969), the entry for the word jabłko ‘apple-SING’ begins with the definition “apple – fruit of the apple tree.” However, jabłka ‘apple-PL’ is a countable noun, while owoce ‘fruit’ is uncountable. For example, one can ask someone for dwa jabłka ‘two apples,’ but not for ?dwa owoce jabłoni ‘two fruits of an apple tree,’ or even for ?dwa owoce ‘two fruits’ (in the sense of two apples). As I argued in my 1984 article, “owoce” is a collective and heterogeneous category, similarly to “warzywa” (vegetables). If one had eaten two carrots, they wouldn’t say ?zjadłam dwa warzywa ‘I’ve eaten two vegetables’ and, in the same way, one wouldn’t say after having eaten two apples ?zjadłam dwa owoce ‘I’ve eaten two fruits.’ This type of grammatical-semantic tests are particularly useful when it comes to establishing the topmost category, superordinate in relation to the one being explicated. Often, the most difficult part – but also the most important one – is the beginning of a “cognitive explication,” and it is here that these kinds of tests are irreplaceable. A good beginning may provide a good foundation for the entire explication. And on a good foundation one can properly build the whole, if one keeps in mind the principles of coherence, standardization of language, and careful attention to linguistic and ethnographic evidence. It is this type of evidence that shows that “jabłka” represent conceptually “one kind” and not “many kinds” (despite the fact that there are words and phrases designating apple cultivars, such as antonówki, papierówki, złote renety or szare renety). In this respect, “jabłka” are conceptually similar to “pszczoły” (bees) and “konie” (horses), and not to “zwierzęta” or “owady” (insects). However, “pszczoły” are, at the first level, “living creatures of one kind” (and “konie” are “one kind of animals”), while “jabłka” are, at the first level, “one kind of things to eat.” The fact that people eat “jabłka” is conceptually superordinate to the fact that “jabłka” grow on trees, in a similar way to the fact that people eat “kartofle” (potatoes) is conceptually superordinate to the fact that “kartofle” grow in the ground.

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Reaching these kinds of conclusions requires in-depth, patient conceptual and ethnolinguistic analysis. Of particular help in such inquiries are a comparative perspective, an interdisciplinary approach, and the combined effort of many people. The harvest is huge, but the workers are, as yet, few. It can be hoped that this will change soon – thanks to, among other reasons, inspiration from Lublin.

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References

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (2009/2012). Aspects of Cognitive Ethnolinguistics. Ed. Jörg Zinken. Sheffield and Oakville, CT: Equinox.

Berlin, Brent. (1992). Ethnobiological Classification. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Goddard, Cliff. (1998). Semantic Analysis: A Practical Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Goddard, Cliff. (2011). Semantic Analysis. [Revised 2nd edition] Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Goddard, Cliff, & Wierzbicka, Anna. (2007). NSM analyses of the semantics of physical qualities: Sweet, hot, hard, heavy, rough, sharp in cross-linguistic perspective. Studies in Language, 31(4), 765-800.

Goddard, Cliff, & Wierzbicka, Anna. (2013). Words and Meanings. Lexical Semantics across Domains, Languages and Cultures. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

SJP. (1958-1969). Słownik języka polskiego. Ed. Witold Doroszewski. 11 vols. Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe.

Wierzbicka, Anna. (1984). Apples are not a “kind of fruit”: The semantics of human categorization. American Ethnologist, 11 (2), 313-328.

Wierzbicka, Anna. (1985). Lexicography and Conceptual Analysis. Ann Arbor: Karoma.

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Wierzbicka, Anna. (1996). Semantics: Primes and Universals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wierzbicka, Anna. (2011). Semanticheskie Universalii i Bazisnye Kontsepty. Moskva: Yazyki Slavyanskix Kuľtur.

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Appendix I. Table of universal concepts

I, YOU, SOMEONE, SOMETHING, PEOPLE, BODY things and persons

KIND, PART relations

THIS, THE SAME, OTHER determiners

ONE, TWO, MANY/MUCH, FEW/LITTLE, SOME, ALL quantifiers

GOOD, BAD evaluators

BIG, SMALL descriptors

THINK, KNOW, WANT, FEEL, SEE, HEAR mental predicates

SAY, WORDS, TRUE speech

DO, HAPPEN, MOVE, TOUCH actions, events, movement, contact

THERE IS, EXIST, HAVE, BE place, existence, possession, identification

LIVE, DIE life and death

WHEN/TIME, NOW, BEFORE, AFTER, A LONG TIME, time A SHORT TIME, FOR SOME TIME, MOMEMT (AT ONE MOMENT) WHERE/PLACE, HERE, ABOVE, BELOW, INSIDE/IN, ON space (WHICH) SIDE, NEAR, FAR BECAUSE, IF, NOT, MAYBE, CAN logical concepts

VERY, MORE augmentor, intensifier

LIKE (WAY) similarity

• Primes exist as specific meanings of certain words (and not as lexical items). • Exponents of primes are words, morphemes or phrasemes. • These exponents can be morphologically complex. • They may have different morphosemantic features in different languages (e.g., they may belong to different parts of speech). • They may have different combinatorial variants (allolexes). • Each prime has a specific set of syntactic (combinatorial) features.

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Appendix II. Explication of the Russian yabloki ‘apples’

yabloki (English translation of the Russian version in Wierzbicka 2011)

THINGS OF ONE KIND PEOPLE EAT THINGS OF THIS KIND WHEN PEOPLE THINK ABOUT THINGS OF THIS KIND, THEY CAN SAY THINGS LIKE THIS ABOUT THEM:

SPECIES things of this kind grow on trees all things of this kind grow on trees of the same kind this kind of tree is called APPLE TREE there are many kinds of things of this kind

HOW PEOPLE CAN GET THEM they grow on trees at some times of the year people do some things in some places because they want trees of this kind to grow in these places they want this because they want to have things of this kind for people to eat after these things have grown on trees for some time they are good for people to eat at that time people can pick them from the tree if people don’t pick them, after some time they fall to the ground

SIZE when someone is eating one thing of this kind, they can hold it with one hand this hand can be touching this thing on many sides at the same time this someone can’t hold it with two fingers, this someone has to hold it with the whole hand

SHAPE things of this kind are round at the same time, two parts look a little different from the other parts one of these two parts is at the top, the other is at the bottom the place in the middle of both these parts is a little below the places on all sides of it in the middle of one of these two parts there is a small thin brownish thing when these things grow on trees, they are attached to the tree by this small thin brownish thing

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COLOUR/RIPENESS when things of this kind grow on trees, before they are good to eat they are green when they are good to eat they can be red, they can be yellow, they can be green often people think about these things like this: if they are red, they are very good to eat when people are eating these things they can see that the parts inside are whitish

HOW PEOPLE EAT THEM

– firmness things of this kind are not soft, at the same time, they are not very hard when people bite them, they can feel something good because of this when people bite them, they can hear something because of it

– skin people can eat these things with the skin, if they want the skin is smooth, it is thin

– inedible parts inside things of this kind, in the middle, there is a part with some very small brownish parts people don’t eat this part

– taste when these things are good to eat, they can be a little sweet, not very sweet

– processing and preservation the juice of these things is good to drink something of another kind made from their juice is good to drink sometimes people cut things of this kind into thin pieces because when such pieces are dry they can be good to eat for a long time

– cooking things of this kind are good to eat when they are cooked they can be good to eat with some other things if they are cooked with these other things

Translated by Klaudia Dolecka and Sławomir Nowodworski

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Chapter 8 The cognitive definition as a text of culture

Jerzy Bartmiński UMCS, Lublin, Poland

1. Setting the scene

The conceptual inventory of Lublin ethnolinguistics revolves around the notion of the linguistic worldview,1 and contains such concepts as stereotype, the cognitive definition, profile and profiling, perspective and viewpoint, the speaking subject, or valuation – they all have their own histories and most have served as themes of conferences and conference proceedings published by Maria Curie Curie-Skłodowska University Press in Lublin, Poland (the so called “red series”).2 The concepts have come to constitute a relatively coherent whole, presented in book form in Bartmiński (2009/2012, esp. chapters 3-9). In the present study I will focus on one of these concepts, which has recently become especially important in an international research project EUROJOS,3 namely the cognitive definition (henceforth CD).4 I will also propose a new interpretation of the CD as a text of culture, in relation to current research on narration.

1 The origin and current understanding of the term in linguistics is discussed in Bartmiński (2006/2012, pp. 11-21); cf. also chapter 3 of Bartmiński (2009/2012). 2 Cf. Bartmiński (1988b; 1990/1999/2004; 2004), Bartmiński & Mazurkiewicz-Brzozowska (1993), Bartmiński & Tokarski (1993; 1998), Anusiewicz & Bartmiński (1998), Bartmiński, Niebrzegowska-Bartmińska, & Nycz (2004), Bartmiński & Pajdzińska (2008). These concepts also appear in various configurations in the other contributions to the present volume. 3 The aim of the project is to reconstruct the linguistic worldview of Slavs and their neighbors, on the basis of multilingual comparative analyses of selected concepts (HOUSE/ HOME, WORK, EUROPE, FREEDOM, HONOR/DIGNITY). The assumptions of the project are presented in Bartmiński (2009/2012, ch. 17), Abramowicz, Bartmiński & Chlebda (2009), Bielińska-Gardziel (2009), and Niebrzegowska-Bartmińska (2013). 4 Cf. also Niebrzegowska-Bartmińska or Prorok & Głaz in this volume.

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2. The cognitive definition: its origin and theoretical assumptions

The idea for the CD emerged in the course of reconstructing a folk view of the human world, a project that was begun in Lublin in 1970s, as one aspect of research on the language of folklore. After the publication of my book O języku folkloru (“On the Language of Folklore,” Bartmiński, 1973), Czesław Hernas, coordinator of a research program on Polish culture, suggested that I analyze and present the lexis of folklore in the form of a dictionary.5 The first attempt towards this goal was a preliminary installment (Bartmiński 1980) of “The Dictionary of Folk Stereotypes and Symbols” (Słownik Stereotypów i Symboli Ludowych, SSSL, 1996-2012). It contains all the major ideas that later began to constitute what Jörg Zinken (2009/2012) calls cognitive ethnolinguistics, with its focus on reconstructing the linguistic worldview of a given speech community and the central notion of stereotypes as socially entrenched images of people, things, and events. Since the very inception of the project, it has been clear that the linguistic worldview embraces a whole gamut of data: the most strongly entrenched systemic data (grammatical categories of tense, person, number, aspect, etc.), lexical meanings, and so-called lexical and cultural collocations (cf. the volume on connotation, Bartmiński (1988b), with its contributions that reference, but also partly oppose, the work of Yuriy Apresyan and Igor Melchuk). I had critiqued the idea of limiting description to necessary and sufficient features in Bartmiński (1984). Stereotypes have been defined in the spirit of Lippmann (1922) and Putnam (1975) as socially entrenched ideas of an object, concerning what it looks like, how it functions, what it is like, and how it is talked about. The proposal in Bartmiński (1980) was at the same time an attempt to meet Putnam’s postulate that it is linguists who should further the principles of establishing the content of stereotypes and the mode of its presentation. The preliminary 1980 installment of the dictionary became a kind of “manifesto” of Lublin ethnolinguistics (it was published in Wrocław but originated and compiled in Lublin). The first attempts to reconstruct stereotypes were then recognized by English-speaking linguists (e.g. Kardela, 1988; 1990) as akin to cognitive linguistics, still a relatively new enterprise at the time.6 The title of Bartmiński’s (1988a) article, “The cognitive definition in a description of connotation,” purposefully reflects these non-coincidental convergences.

5 I present the history of these endeavors in Bartmiński (2008). 6 This view of Lublin ethnolinguistics was then corroborated by Tabakowska (2004), Zinken (2004; 2009/2012), Nepop-Ajdaczyć (2007) and Grzegorczykowa (2010). A critique was launched by Kiklewicz & Wilczewski (2011) but refuted by Głaz (to appear).

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The ethnolinguistic aspect of the Lublin project was taken as a commitment for the dictionary to present language in the context of culture. Furthermore, both the content and the form of the definitions were to be based on the principles of subject-oriented reconstruction, i.e. one that would reflect common experience, colloquial conceptualization and categorization of the world, colloquial (or folk) knowledge of the world. I illustrate these principles in Bartmiński (1988a) with two examples: the colloquial standard Polish deszcz ‘rain’ and the folk Polish strzygoń ‘vampire’ – these are their shortened versions:

DESZCZ ‘rain’ water in the form of drops falls from the clouds with different intensity it may mżyć ‘drizzle,’ kropić ‘spit,’ lać ‘pour’ (cf. the corresponding names: mżawka ‘drizzle,’ kapuśniaczek ‘drizzle,’ ulewa ‘downpour’) co-occurs with storm and lightning foreboded by a twinging in the bones or the behavior of crows and swallows (based on Bartmiński, 1988a, pp. 175-176)7

STRZYGOŃ ‘vampire’ a fright with double rows of teeth, a pale face, livid marks on the back, blood behind fingernails, closed eyes comes out of the coffin at midnight and roams the earth in silence, strangles people appears at night and disappears when the rooster crows can be made powerless by driving an aspen pin or a nail into its head (based on Bartmiński, 1988a, 174)8

7 Cf. SJPWar (1900-1927), vol. 1 (1900): “watery precipitation, falling to the ground in the form of drops”; SJPDor (1958-1969), vol. 2: “atmospheric precipitation in the form of raindrops falling from a cloud”; PSWP (1994-2005), vol. 8: “atmospheric precipitation in the form of water drops above 0.5mm in diameter, or occasionally smaller, that results from the linking of small drops or melting of ice crystals [sic!] in the cloud”; ISJP (2000): “raindrops falling from a cloud.” 8 Dictionaries of standard Polish do not list strzygoń, which is considered folk dialectal; cf. SJPWar, vol. 6 (1915): “(folk dialectal) the soul of an illegitimate male child, prematurely deceased, assuming various shapes and tempting married women to sin, cf. strzyga.” It is instructive to note the differences between the definitions of strzygoń and those of the nearly-synonymous strzyga, cf. SJPDor, vol. 8 (1966): “according to folk accounts: the soul of a child born with teeth and prematurely deceased, assuming various shapes and scaring people.” ISJP (2000): “according to folk beliefs, strzyga is a frightening creature that assumes the appearance of e.g. an old woman or a bird, frightens people and often feeds on their blood.” PSWP, vol. 40 (2003): “in Slavic folk beliefs, a vampire, witch or the soul of a child born with teeth; it assumes the shape of a person or a bird feeding on human blood; it harms people and frightens them.” As one can see, lexicographers are helpless in defining mythological creatures – these can only be explicated contextually, on the basis of texts.

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The idea of the CD, which without using the term was de facto introduced in the dictionary’s preliminary installment in 1980, is best illustrated in contrast to, on the one hand, the definitions in dictionaries of standard Polish,9 and on the other hand, to encyclopedic definitions. Let us take the Polish word koń ‘horse.’ In dictionaries of standard (“national”) Polish, the word is defined thus:

(equus caballus) a single-toed animal with fibulae, i.e. bare, callused skin on the inside of the legs (SJPWar, vol. 2, 1902)

Equus caballus, a one-toed herbivorous mammal belonging to the family Equidae, domesticated, bred as a draft animal; also living in the wild (SJPDor, vol. 3, 1961)

a herbivorous even-toed mammal of the Equidae family, weighing between 200 and 1,000 kilograms; a quadruped with a short but long-haired tail, a long head crowned with a mane; bred as a draft animal, a beast of burden, a saddle animal, or for slaughter; there exist many breeds of horses; it also lives in the wild; Equus caballus (PWSP, vol. 17, 1998)

Equus caballus, a big herbivorous animal with a long head and neck, a mane on the crest and the forehead, a long-haired tail, long and hoofed legs and short-haired coat; bred as a saddle or draft animal (USJP, 2003)

In the Gazeta Wyborcza Encyclopedia (EGW, 2005), the horse is described as a class of animals known worldwide:

[A]n animal of the Equidae family, used as a draft or saddle animal, less frequently as a beast of burden or for slaughter (meat, hide, hair); in parts of Asia, the milk of mares is used for making koumiss. The origin of the domestic horse is uncertain, it has probably evolved from the wild Przewalski’s horse, the Tarpan, and the extinct Asian forest and tundra horses; domestication probably took place around 8-6,000 years B.C. in Europe and Asia (independently); the breeding first developed in Central Asia, then in Asia Minor, Macedonia, Greece and Rome, and only in the 4th c. A.D. in Arabia.

9 About three decades ago, I drew this kind of comparison in a study on lexicographic definitions (Bartmiński, 1984).

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With regard to build, horses are classified as hot-blooded (light and noble, e.g. purebred Arabian horses) and cold-blooded (heavy, e.g. Arden horses); with regard to the use there are saddle horses (e.g. the Thoroughbred), all-purpose farm and carriage horses (e.g. the Wielkopolski), sport and farm horses (e.g. the Oldenburg), heavy draft horses (e.g. the Breton), or beasts of burden (e.g. the Hucul pony). Horse breeds are diversified with respect to size (80-180 cm, i.e. around 8-18 hands, at the withers), build and body mass (200-1,200 kilograms), as well as use. There also exist breeds that are around 4 hands at the withers and weigh about 15 kilograms (the Pony of the Americas). The domestic horse achieves sexual maturity at 12-18 months, reproduction begins at the age of 3, full biological maturity is reached at the age of 5-6. Pregnancy lasts 336 days on average; usually one foal is born, very rarely two (1% of cases); stallions can usually reproduce until the age of 16-24. Horses are used for working since the age of 3 to 20; the domestic horse lives 18-30 years; the age is estimated by looking at the teeth. Horses have diverse coat colors. Due to the mechanization of work, the significance of the domestic horse in farming and transportation has been diminishing, as have the stocks, although it is still found useful, esp. in small farming and horticulture. In contrast, its significance in sport and recreation has risen significantly; hippotherapy has also been developing.10

As one can see, lexicographers use nominal definitions and aim at objectivity; they attempt to add a scientific dimension to their explanations, thanks to which the word has an unambiguous reference to the object. They willingly resort to specialized nomenclature and even introduce Latin terms. Citations of the use of words in contexts (collocations, stock phrases, metaphors) are isolated from definitions proper and provided in separate sections of the dictionary entries. Despite aspirations to scientific objectivity and the use of taxonomic classifications, the explications exhibit a considerable degree of diversity with regard to both content and the terminology being used. Differences between dictionaries pertain both to the number and the quality of the defining features of the horse. Categorization is performed differently (with hyperonyms animal or mammal), different properties of the object are taken into account (appearance and built, weight, nutrition, usefulness) and within one aspect, e.g.

10 Division into paragraphs J.B.

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body built, different specific features of its characterization are underscored. Some lexicographers additionally introduce numeric parameters (“body mass from 200 to 1,200 kilograms”) and so approximate their lexicographic definition to an encyclopedic description. It is thus corroborated that “the dictionary is subjective (subject-oriented) in its nature” and “by making decisions, the lexicographer interprets linguistic data” (Chlebda, 2010, p. 14), including word meanings. Encyclopedic definitions, in turn, are purely objective: they describe things in the real world rather than the way they are named and portrayed linguistically. The encyclopedic definition above mentions the place of the horse in animal taxonomy, its origin, diversification according to the build, the stages of its life, its role in contemporary economic and social reality, etc. Usually, the differences in various parts of the world are noted. The cognitive definition of the horse proposed in the preliminary installment of SSSL (Bartmiński, 1980) differs both from typical, traditional lexicographic definitions and from encyclopedic definitions. It addresses different questions and takes note of subjective components. If the former two types are largely one-sided, the CD is multi-sided or, in the words of Wojciech Chlebda (1993), “two-eyed.” What does this mean? I will give here a simplified version of the definition (the full explication extends over fifteen pages, or as many as twenty-five pages with the documentation):

KOŃ ‘horse’ a big and valuable livestock animal wise and faithful helps people and can sense a person’s death used as a saddle and as a draft animal (for pulling carts, the plow, or the harrow) occupies the highest position in the farm hierarchy and custom considered a man’s animal (of the householder, a young man, or a soldier), as much as the cow is a woman’s animal possession of horses is a sign of affluence and a reason for pride considered to be vigorous and demonic (Bartmiński, 1980, pp. 119-144)

The idea of the CD rests on the following assumptions: 1. The CD “aims to portray the way in which an entity is viewed by the speakers of a language, to represent socio-culturally established and linguistically entrenched knowledge, its categorisation and valuation” (Bartmiński, 1988a, pp. 169-170, quoted from Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 67). The socially dependent view of an object may differ from one language to another or even from one language variety to another.

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The traditional, folk image of the horse can be compared with its image in standard Polish. Referring to the entry in Bartmiński (1980) and to my article on the lexicographic definition (Bartmiński, 1984), Janusz Anusiewicz proposed a slightly different definition for standard Polish – it basically meets the requirement of the CD, although the author did not use the term:

KOŃ ‘horse’: a big, strong and valuable domesticated animal, used for heavy work, as a draft or a saddle animal; it is characterized by an elongated body, a big head, big longish teeth, hard hooves, a long tail, and a long mane; it can run fast and jump; it produces loud and noisy sounds. The following features are attributed to the horse: health, strength, large size, grandeur, intensity. Due to its usefulness for people, it is positively valuated and liked. (Anusiewicz, 1990, p. 149)11

In contrast to the objectivized, impersonal dictionary and encyclopedic definitions, the CD is subject-oriented: it reflects the viewpoint of a socially and culturally defined experiencing and conceptualizing subject. 2. The basic unit being defined is a “mental object,” which is not a reflection but an interpretation or a projection of the real object. It contains the whole richness of its linguistically entrenched characterization, both descriptive and evaluative.

11 In a similar manner, Anusiewicz reconstructs the linguistic and cultural view of the cat in colloquial Polish: KOT ‘CAT’: a small animal with sharp, crooked and prehensile claws, good eyesight, a shapely round head, agile and slender body covered with a soft and fluffy coat; endearing and playful, hence often bred for play but also for catching mice; it hates dogs, purrs and meows, likes milk; it hunts alone; it moves about noiselessly. The following features are attributed to the cat: cunning, wisdom, shrewdness, cleverness, cautiousness, wariness, deftness, as well as unyieldingness, independence and self- reliance. Because of its gracefulness, docility, the softness of its fur (pleasant tactile sensations), and usefulness, it is liked and approached with a friendly attitude. (Anusiewicz, 1990, p. 138) The definitions of kot ‘cat’ in dictionaries of Polish are markedly different: zool. (Felis) a sucking predatory animal with protractile claws and a spiky tongue (SJPWar, vol. II, 1902) Felis domestica, a domestic animal from the family of the same name (SJPDor, vol. 3, 1961) a small domesticated animal, originating from Asian and African wild cats; there are numerous noble breeds and interbred forms of the cat; it is mainly bred in an amateur fashion, for hunting mice and other rodents; Felis domestica (PSWP, vol. 17, 1998) a small animal with a soft fur, long whiskers and claw-ended paws. Some people keep cats at home for hunting mice or for pleasure (ISJP, 2000) Felis domestica, a small animal with a soft fur, a long tail and whiskers, claw-ended paws, small spiky ears and a slender body (USJP, 2003)

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3. The CD must meet two requirements: of content adequacy, i.e. the definition must contain common, everyday knowledge (the perception, conceptualization and valuation of the world by a given speech community), and structural adequacy, i.e. the links between its features should reflect those relationships between them that are “sanctioned” in a given language and culture. 4. The requirement of content adequacy means that the CD should take note of all the positive features attributed to the object by the speakers. These include both the categorial and the characteristic (characterizing) features, plus those traditionally labeled “connotative,” e.g. not only the fact that the horse is an ‘animal’ but also that it is perceived as ‘strong,’ ‘healthy,’ ‘wise,’ and ‘faithful.’ These are not the features of a “typical” (any average) horse but of a “stereotypical” horse (the horse “as it is and should be”). The CD is not restricted to necessary and sufficient features (for a justification cf. Bartmiński, 1984),12 let alone distinctive features (or, rather, those that are deemed distinctive by the analyst!). The CD is based on linguistic (systemic and textual) data but also makes use of experimental data (questionnaires), as well as accounts of socially entrenched behaviors and beliefs (the so called “co-linguistic data,” cf. Bartmiński, 2009/2012, pp. 34-3513). 5. For a feature to be considered entrenched, it has to be supported by “linguistic evidence” (Wierzbicka, 1996, pp. 355ff.). A set of such features positively attributed to the object and thus included in the CD can be identified through an analysis of the language system, texts, and by means of questionnaires. The stereotype of the horse in the Polish folk tradition has been reconstructed on the broad basis of systemic data, in accordance with the methodology of investigating the linguistic worldview,14 i.e. through an analysis of the word’s “internal form” (its etymological motivation), the place of the name in a network of paradigmatic relations (hyperonyms, hyponyms, synonyms, co-hyponyms, also antonyms), partonomic relations (the parts of the horse’s body), and syntagmatic relations (links with other elements in the sentence, with a salient

12 This means that distinctive features are not underscored (though they are by no means rejected) but are considered secondary, being dependent on the comparative perspective of the speaker (scholar). The extension of one’s interest beyond “distinctive feature semantics” towards a holistic description marks the boundary between the structuralist and the cognitivist approaches. For a discussion of these approaches with regard to questions of synonymy, polysemy, and vagueness cf. Łozowski (2000). 13 The less fortunate term ad-linguistic is used in that publication. 14 The methodology is a joint effort of such (often independently working) authors as Yuriy Apresyan, Jerzy Bartmiński, Renata Grzegorczykowa, Jolanta Maćkiewicz, Stanisława Niebrzegowska-Bartmińska, Anna Pajdzińska, Jadwiga Puzynina, Ryszard Tokarski, and others.

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roles of the Agent, Patient, the feeling and experiencing Subject/Sensor, the Addressee and the Instrument), analyses of recurring uses in stereotyped texts (such as proverbs, riddles, songs, tales, etc.). Accounts of beliefs and practices were also taken into account (the simplified version of the entry can be found in Bartmiński, 2009/2012, pp. 22-37). Following Bartmiński (1980), the procedure of feature verification was exquisitely applied by Janusz Anusiewicz (1990), who showed, among others, that: • the feature ‘big, strong’ is found in phraseological units such as móc zjeść konia kopytami ‘(be so hungry that) one could eat a horse,’ żre jak koń ‘he eats a lot’ (lit. like a horse), końska dawka ‘megadose’ (lit. ‘horse’s dose’); • the feature ‘healthy’ appears in the stock phrase końskie zdrowie ‘the constitution of a horse’; • the feature ‘speed, intensity’ appears in pędzi, co koń wyskoczy ‘runs like a bat out of hell’ (lit. ‘as fast as a horse’) and i w sto koni nie dogoni, lit. ‘one wouldn’t catch (them) even with a hundred horses’; the notion of speed is also present in the etymology of koń: according to Brückner (1927), the Old Polish expression iść komunikiem, related to koń, meant ‘on horseback, without carts’ but also ‘fast’; • ‘characteristic body parts’: cf. koński ogon ‘ponytail,’ końska grzywa ‘thick hair’ (lit. ‘horse’s mane’), końskie zęby ’big, long teeth’ (lit. ‘horse’s teeth’); • ‘loud, easily recognizable sound’: rżeć jak koń ‘laugh loudly’ (lit. ‘neigh like a horse’); • the feature ‘valuable, wise, grand’ is present in proverbs based on opposition: Konia puścił, mysz chwycił ‘He let the horse go but caught a mouse’; Przesiadł się z konia na osła ‘He got down a horse and mounted a donkey’; Konia kują, a żaba nadstawia nogę ‘As they are shoeing the horse, the frog is offering its leg’; • ‘usefulness for hard work’: harować jak koń ‘work like a horse,’ etc. I am not listing all the features of the horse that make up its linguistic portrait, for it is only important to show the method of revealing their semantic relevance (more on this issue in Bartmiński, 2009/2012, pp. 30-31). From today’s perspective, one can see that the features extracted with this method have a diverse status (which Anusiewicz does not show): some of them relate to the very object and are “objective,” encyclopedic (‘big,’ ‘strong,’ ‘has a head, mane, teeth, hooves,’ ‘neighs’), others contribute subjective valuation and emotional estimates imposed by speakers onto the object: ‘wise,’ ‘faithful,’ ‘liked by people.’ In the folk view of the horse the subjective features are more numerous (‘demonic,’ ‘sensing death,’ ‘vigorous,’ ‘man’s animal’). 6. The features attributed to the object can pertain to its various aspects: appearance, build, function, usefulness for people, etc. To uncover the aspectual interpretation of the object by the speaking subject is an important task of the researcher. Bundles of features, linked into “semantic subcategories” according

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to aspects to which they relate, reveal ways of seeing the object characteristic of specific speech communities. The objectified “picture” becomes a subjective “vision,” depending on who talks about it, from what point of view, what is the speaker’s attitude to it, etc.15 A comparison of the folk (Bartmiński, 1980), “literary” (Anusiewicz, 1995), and encyclopedic views of the horse shows that the differences pertain both to the selection of subcategories (facets) and their content. 7. The defining method is through “minimal diagnostic contexts” in the form of sentences communicating stereotypical judgments of the object. In other words, these are not abstract names of features but sentences or their equivalents: “The horse pulls wagons,” “The horse is a saddle animal,” “The horse is a healthy animal (as a rule),” “The horse can sense a person’s death,” etc. These sentences function in a pragmatic-modal frame that one can express as “the speakers think that...” and relate it to “a stereotypical horse.” The defining sentences can be linked into logical sequences and assume the shape of a “regular” text, in which one can identify the principles of temporal sequence, cause-and-effect, part-vs.-whole, or logical implication. The cognitive definition of the horse above may thus be “textualized” or even reformulated as a narrative:

KOŃ ‘horse’ is a big and valuable livestock animal; it is wise and faithful, and helps people because it is used for riding and as a draft animal. It occupies the highest position in the farm hierarchy and custom. It is considered a man’s animal (the animal of the householder, a young man, or a soldier), as much as the cow is a woman’s animal. Possession of horses is a sign of affluence and a reason for pride. The horse is considered vigorous and demonic; it is also thought to be able to sense a person’s death.

A CD thus constructed meets the criteria of the contextual definition,16 it is the latter’s more elaborate form. Having said which, we can proceed to the

15 The following subcategories (later called facets) were identified in Bartmiński (1980): collection, parts, attributes, quantity, agent, subject, state, process, provenance, stimulus, object, addressee, instrument, location, similarity, equivalencies, oppositions. The ordering of the subcategories was not important. It was only when Anna Wierzbicka (1985) emphasized the significance of the sequence of subcategories that the order of the facets was adjusted to the internal logic of the concept, to its implication-based “cognitive structure.” 16 The contextual definition focuses on the entry word in context and corresponds to the logical conceptions of the “entangled definition,” the “axiomatic definition,” or “a definition through postulates,” developed by Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz (1965), Leon Koj (1969) or Tadeusz Pawłowski (1978) in relation to the work of Rudolf Carnap. For Ajdukiewicz (1965, pp. 79-82), a definition through postulates is an arrangement of sentences (“postulates”) that contains the word being defined in various contexts and that meets two conditions: of non-contradiction (i.e. it has a solution) and of non-ambiguity (i.e. it has no more than one solution). Such sentences mark out the meaning of the word.

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next section and address the very heart of the matter, namely the question of whether the CD is text and in what sense it is a text of culture.

3. The cognitive definition as text

I put forward two hypotheses here: first, a definition is text; second, a definition is a text of culture, which is particularly true of the cognitive definition. To say that a definition is text means that it meets the requirements of textuality. I assume that text is a super-sentential linguistic unit (i.e. one that is higher than a sentence in the typological sense, not necessarily longer), a communicatively autonomous macro-sign characterized by structural integrity and semantic coherence. It has its subject (the sender/speaker), a specific genological and stylistic markedness, an identifiable intention that facilitates understanding by the hearer. It is subject to internal divisions, semantic and logical, and in the case of longer texts – also compositional (Bartmiński & Niebrzegowska-Bartmińska, 2009, p. 36).17 Definitions meet all the criteria of textuality. Let us consider yet another example, namely that of BOCIAN ‘stork,’ analyzed in detail by Bartmiński & Niebrzegowska-Bartmińska (2008). The CD of BOCIAN in standard Polish, a reconstruction of the image entrenched in Polish culture based exclusively on “core” systemic data, contains about twenty features supported by “linguistic evidence.”18 The features are presented as sequences of sentences or phrases that can easily be “textualized”:

17 Beaugrande i Dressler (1981) formulated seven criteria of textuality: cohesion (linking of words according to grammatical rules), coherence (a logical connection and consistency), intentionality, acceptability, informativity, situationality (the text is relevant to the situation of occurrence), intertextuality (its understanding depends on the knowledge of other texts). Bartmiński & Niebrzegowska-Bartmińska (2009, p. 49) add stylistic and genological markedness, plus they underscore the presence of the speaking subject, implied by the message’s intentionality. 18 Each of the twenty features can be supported by “linguistic evidence” that corroborates its semantic relevance. These are stable features usually included in lexicographic definitions, but also: (i) the metaphorical extension of bocian meaning ‘a long-legged and slow-walking person’; (ii) phraseological units: chodzić na bocianich nogach ‘walk with long, slow strides,’ (lit. ‘on stork’s legs’), wierzyć w bociany ‘be naive’ (lit. ‘believe in storks’); (iii) co-occurring collocations: bocianie nogi ‘stork’s (i.e. long and thin) legs,’ bociani krok ‘a long, slow stride,’ bociani dziób ‘stork’s (i.e. long and red) bill’; (iv) collocations: przylot/odlot bocianów ‘coming and going of storks,’ wędrówka bocianów ‘stork migration,’ bocianówka ‘the water supposed to help a woman become pregnant’ (cf. Bartmiński & Niebrzegowska- Bartmińska, 2008). The image of the stork in folk Polish is much richer; e.g. the presence of a stork on one’s farm is considered a good omen, the destruction of storks’ nests is forbidden, the behavior of storks is used to foretell the future, etc. The full description of the relevant folk stereotype will be included in a future volume of SSSL.

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BOCIAN is a big black-and-white bird, with a long red bill, long neck, and long red legs. It produces characteristic sounds (clatter), walks slowly (wades), stands on one leg, arrives in spring and flies away in fall (migrates), gathers in flocks that fly in V formations while migrating. It feeds on frogs and cleanses the world of them in this way. It lives in damp areas and on swamps, builds nests on rooftops, chimneys and poles. It is believed to bring babies.19

This definition is a semantically and structurally coherent text, it realizes a certain pattern of textual structure, an easily recognizable, peculiar speech genre with a clear intention to explain something. The pattern is composed of three canonical components: the definiendum, the copula plus the definiens,20 and the communicative intention – these help the reader to interpret the definition.21 Definitions as a speech genre belong to scientific and official style, where the need for precision and non-ambiguity of expression is especially high.22 It must be emphasized here that a definition always rests on a certain type of knowledge and on the convictions of a speaker/subject. In the definition of the stork above, the subject is someone who watches storks from close-up, lives in a country where there are swamps, frogs, houses with chimneys or poles, where

19 In the CD, it is possible to show its internal segmentation into facets; however, contrary to the views of many authors, the facet-based parametrization of the CD is not its most important feature. In SSSL, facets are introduced as inconspicuous “icons.” Should one desire to use the full names of the facets (cf. Wierzbicka, 1985; this volume), the CD of BOCIAN would assume the following shape: BOCIAN is [categorization] a bird that is [size] large, [appearance: color] black-and-white, [appearance: built] with a long red bill, long neck, long red legs; [behavior] it produces characteristic sounds (clatter), walks slowly (wades), stands on one leg, arrives in spring and flies away in fall (migrates), gathers in flocks that fly in V formations while migrating; [eating habits] it feeds on frogs and cleanses the world of them in this way; [location] lives in damp areas and on swamps, builds nests on rooftops, chimneys and poles; [beliefs] it is believed to bring babies. 20 Several definition types can be identified. In the opinion of the Polish lexicographer Witold Doroszewski, the best is the reality-cum-semantics definition, which he distinguished from the structural and the range-based definitions. Anna Wierzbicka has for several decades consistently used extended explications based on a limited set of semantic primes. I have based my idea of the CD on sentences that communicate standard, colloquial (stereotypical, i.e. entrenched and repeated) judgments about mental objects. Halina Zgółkowa operates with encyclopedic definitions. Mirosław Bańko has introduced contextual definitions into his ISJP (2000), etc. Sager (2000) is a useful anthology of classic, philosophical approaches to definition. 21 With reference to these properties of text, Bakhtin (1976/1986) uses the term finalization. 22 A speech genre is not only based on the communicative intention but also invokes a specific worldview and endows it with an appropriate ontological (modal) status. It has a variety of linguistic forms at its disposal.

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storks come in spring and fly away in fall; it is someone who considers frogs to be “impure,” someone who both believes in and doubts that storks bring babies. The speaking subject, the “creator of the scene,” is mentally immersed in Polish folk culture. In that culture, there is also a conviction (without evidence in standard Polish) that a destruction of a stork’s nest brings misfortune in the form of a fire because the stork “takes revenge.” The part of the definition called the definiens has a significant informative value: from the textological point of view it is referred to as the rheme: it supplies new information. The scale of the novelty of the rheme (Jan Firbas’s “communicative dynamism,” 1992, ch.2) depends on the whole situational context: who compiles the definition, for whom and why, to what kind of the receiver’s knowledge does it relate? The definitions constructed by a specialist for a layperson will differ from those constructed by a teacher for his/her pupils, by a lexicographer for a broad audience, or by an expert in a given language for an overseas student of that language, etc.23 The frequent postulate of contextual substitutability of the definiendum and the definiens is by no means absolute; indeed, its application can bring grotesque results.24

4. The cognitive definition as a text of culture

In what sense and thanks to which of its features is the CD a text of culture? Texts of culture are those that have a special, above-average significance for the speakers, the community, and the culture that unites it. These are texts that function as a “communal good, maintained, transmitted, and enriched by subsequent generations” (SPTK, 2002, p. 307), those that have a certain social character and “realize a socially entrenched pattern” (STL, 1998, p. 575). Texts of culture carry socially important ideas; they influence people’s imagination and emotions.25 Included here are literary texts, as well as films, dramas, musical

23 The diverse definition types vis-à-vis their goals are discussed in Grochowski (1993). 24 Cf. e.g. Stefan Themerson’s Professor Mmaa’s Lecture (1953). 25 According to SPTK (2000), a text of culture is a text that is considered a common good, maintained, transmitted, and enriched by subsequent generations, an objectified result of a multi-generational activity, with a potential to spread and develop. It results from the repeated internal and external behavior of members of a given community (e.g. thinking, feeling, acts of creation). Next, it is said that a text of culture has a material dimension (it may be a book, a painting, a film reel) and a spiritual one, i.e. “it expresses the symbolic aspect of the object, it shapes attitudes, influences thinking and emotions.” It may be a single object, a specific literary work of art, performance or film, or it may be the culture’s literature, theater or cinema in the global sense.

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compositions, paintings, etc. “Texts of culture participate in the creation of social bonds, function as sources of knowledge that underlies the development of a civilization.” Therefore, “researching texts of culture allows one to trace and participate in the spiritual and material development of societies.” The role of language is to co-create texts of culture and facilitate their transmission from one generation to the next (SPTK, 2002, p. 307). Thus, the CD is a text of culture in three ways: 1) it contains a record of socially entrenched knowledge about objects, people, and phenomena; 2) it contains a record of convictions and beliefs entertained by the speakers with regard to the world and to people; 3) it relates to the norms and values shared by the speaking subject. It is sufficient to consider the two examples discussed here, i.e. the cognitive definitions of the horse and the stork, to see that the subject-oriented structure of the CD, its emphasis on the reconstruction of the viewpoint and the cognitive perspective of speaking subjects in a given culture, leads one to reveal the knowledge, experience, beliefs, norms, and values entertained by those subjects. The CD is an instrument of a description and understanding culture in the ideational sense (following Ward Goodenough, e.g. 1957), as a complex of norms and values underlying the language-entrenched worldview. As the final point, let us consider the cognitive definition of MATKA ‘mother’ (cf. Bartmiński, 1998) to take better note of the role of norms and values as cultural factors. The CD of MATKA, built of defining sentences based on linguistic evidence, sentences-judgments that conform to the principles of subject- oriented reconstruction, should contain at least thirty stereotypical features. They can be arranged into a text with a characteristic cognitive structure:

MATKA is a woman who gave birth to a child, nourishes and brings up the child, and is tender towards the child; she is ready to sacrifice and understands everything; she also scolds and punishes the child for misbehavior; but she is the only one, irreplaceable, etc. (cf. Bartmiński, 1998; 2009/2012, ch. 11)

The sentences that constitute the CD can have a different status or modality. The categorial aspect (“every mother”) is attributed to the feature “gave birth to,” but not to “brings up” – because not every mother does (only those who fulfill social and cultural norms, the “true” mothers). As the proverb has it, “The mother is not the one who gave birth, but the one who raised.” It appears that the characterization of the mother is subjected in the stereotype to double modification, whose nature is expressed by the generalizing quantifier every and the modifiers connected with it: typical (normal, usual, average, representative, etc.) and true. If the modifier typical has a descriptive value and is subject to

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truth-conditional verification, true means something more: ‘the way it is and should be.’ It thus has a descriptive and deontic value, it relates to the norm and value system of the speaker and escapes truth-conditional verification (for more details cf. Bartmiński, 2009/2012, pp. 138-140). It is at this juncture that the CD, which reconstructs the interpretation of the mental object by language speakers, most forcefully encroaches on the cultural terrain: it becomes a text of culture in the sense defined. Not only does it express a socially entrenched experience of the world, the elements that constitute knowledge of the world and historical memory, but also actualizes the valuation inherent therein, provides access to the system of norms and values that lie at the core of every culture. This is particularly conspicuous in the case of highly abstract concepts such as FREEDOM, EQUALITY, SOLIDARITY, RESPONSIBILITY, DIGNITY/HONOR, WORK, or JUSTICE, recently in the limelight of the international project EUROJOS (cf. Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 223; Abramowicz, Bartmiński, Chlebda, 2009; Bielińska-Gardziel 2009; Niebrzegowska-Bartmińska 2013). Their respective cognitive definitions must always relate to a broader context, norms and values, and propose an interpretation of the concepts within the framework of a cultural paradigm.

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References

Abramowicz, Maciej, Bartmiński, Jerzy, & Chlebda, Wojciech. (2009). Językowy obraz świata Słowian na tle porównawczym. Założenia programu „A” (10 VI 2009). Etnolingwistyka, 21, 341-342.

Ajdukiewicz, Kazimierz. (1965). Logika pragmatyczna. Warszawa: PWN.

Anusiewicz, Janusz. (1990). Językowo-kulturowy obraz kota w polszczyźnie. Etnolingwistyka, 3, 95-141.

Anusiewicz, Janusz. (1995). Lingwistyka kulturowa: zarys problematyki. Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego.

Anusiewicz, Janusz, & Bartmiński, Jerzy. (Eds.). (1998). Stereotyp jako przedmiot lingwistyki. Series Język a Kultura, vol. XII. Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego.

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. (1976/1986) The problem of speech genres. In his Speech genres and other Late Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Eds.) (pp. 60-102). Austin: University of Texas Press.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (1973). O języku folkloru. Wrocław-Warszawa-Kraków-Gdańsk: Ossolineum.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (Ed.) (1980). Słownik ludowych stereotypów językowych. Zeszyt próbny. Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (1984). Definicja leksykograficzna a opis języka. In Kazimierz Polański (Ed.), Słownictwo w opisie języka (pp. 9-21). Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego.

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Bartmiński, Jerzy. (1988a). Definicja kognitywna jako narzędzie opisu konotacji. In Jerzy Bartmiński (Ed.), Konotacja (pp. 169-183). Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Bartmiński, Jerzy (Ed.). (1988b). Konotacja. Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Bartmiński, Jerzy (Ed.). (1990/1999/2004). Językowy obraz świata. Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (1998). Podstawy lingwistycznych badań nad stereotypem – na przykładzie stereotypu matki. Język a Kultura, vol. 12 (pp. 63-83). Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (Ed.). (2004). Język w kręgu wartości. Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (2006/2012). Językowe podstawy obrazu świata. 5th ed. Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (2008). Etnolingwistyka, lingwistyka kulturowa, lingwistyka antropologiczna. Język a Kultura, vol. 20, ed. Anna Dąbrowska (pp. 15-33). Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (2009/2012). Aspects of Cognitive Ethnolinguistics. Ed. Jörg Zinken. Sheffield and Oakville, CT: Equinox.

Bartmiński, Jerzy, & Niebrzegowska-Bartmińska, Stanisława. (2008). Miejsce informacji kulturowej w znaczeniu słowa i w rekonstrukcji językowego obrazu świata. In Grażyna Szwat-Gyłybow & Magdalena Bogusławska (Eds.), Bunt tradycji – tradycja buntu (pp. 65-77). Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego.

Bartmiński, Jerzy, & Niebrzegowska-Bartmińska, Stanisława. (2009). Tekstologia. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN.

Bartmiński, Jerzy, & Mazurkiewicz-Brzozowska, Małgorzata. (Eds.). (1993). Nazwy wartości. Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Bartmiński Jerzy, Niebrzegowska-Bartmińska, Stanisława, & Nycz, Ryszard. (Eds.). (2004). Punkt widzenia w języku i w kulturze. Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Bartmiński, Jerzy, & Pajdzińska, Anna. (Eds.). (1998). Podmiot w języku i w kulturze. Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

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Bartmiński, Jerzy, & Tokarski, Ryszard. (Eds.). (1993). O definicjach i definiowaniu. Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Bartmiński, Jerzy, & Tokarski, Ryszard. (Eds.). (1998). Profilowanie w języku i w tekście. Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Beaugrande, Robert, & Dressler, Wolfgang U. (1981). Introduction to Text Linguistics. London: Longman.

Bielińska-Gardziel, Iwona. (2009). O pracach konwersatorium EUROJOS. Etnolingwistyka, 21, 343-345.

Brückner, Aleksander. (1927). Słownik etymologiczny języka polskiego. Kraków: Krakowska Spółka Wydawnicza.

Chlebda, Wojciech. (1993). Słownik a „dwuoczne postrzeganie świata.” In Jerzy Bartmiński & Ryszard Tokarski (Eds.), O definicjach i definiowaniu (pp. 195-205). Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Chlebda, Wojciech. (2010). W poszukiwaniu językowo-kulturowego obrazu świata Słowian. In Wojciech Chlebda (Ed.), Etnolingwistyka a leksykografia (pp. 7-20). Opole: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Opolskiego.

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ISJP. (2000). Inny słownik języka polskiego. Ed. Mirosław Bańko. Warszawa: PWN.

Kardela, Henryk. (1988). Tak zwana gramatyka kognitywna a problem stereotypu. Etnolingwistyka, 1, 35-46.

Kardela, Henryk. (1990). Ogdena i Richardsa trójkąt uzupełniony, czyli co bada gramatyka kognitywna. In Jerzy Bartmiński (Ed.), Językowy obraz świata (pp. 15- 40). Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Kiklewicz, Aleksander, & Wilczewski, Michał. (2011). Współczesna lingwistyka kulturowa: zagadnienia dyskusyjne (na marginesie monografii Jerzego Bartmińskiego Aspects of Cognitive Ethnolinguistics. Biuletyn Polskiego Towarzystwa Językoznawczego/Bulletin de la Société Polonaise de Linguistique, LXVII, 165-178.

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Nepop-Ajdaczyć, Lidia. (2007). Polska etnolingwistyka kognitywna. Pomoc dydaktyczna. Kyiv: Centrum wydawniczo-poligraficzne “Uniwersytet Kijowski.”

Niebrzegowska-Bartmińska, Stanisława. (2013). Tsennosto slavyan i ikh sosedey v ramkakh programmy sravnitel’nykh issledovaniy standartnykh yazykov. Slavyanskye yazyki i kul’tury Proshloe, nastayashchee, budushchee. Materialy V Mezhdunarodnoy nauchno-prakticheskoy konferentsii, Irkutsk, 21-22 maya 2013 goda (pp. 125-135). Irkutsk.

Pawłowski, Tadeusz. (1978). Rodziny znaczeń i ich definiowanie. Studia Filozoficzne, 2, 81-99.

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SJPDor. (1958-1969). Słownik języka polskiego PAN. Vols. 1-11. Ed. Witold Doroszewski. Warszawa: PWN.

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SSSL. (1996-2012). Słownik stereotypów i symboli ludowych. Ed. Jerzy Bartmiński & Stanisława Niebrzegowska-Bartmińska. Vol. I, parts 1-4. Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

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Wierzbicka, Anna. (1985). Lexicography and Conceptual Analysis. Ann Arbor: Karoma Publishers.

Zinken, Jörg. (2004). Metaphors, stereotypes, and the linguistic picture of the world: Impulses from the Ethnolinguistic School of Lublin. metaphorik.de 7, 115- 136.

Zinken, Jörg. (2009/2012). The Ethnolinguistic School of Lublin and Anglo- American Cognitive Linguistics. The introductory chapter to Jerzy Bartmiński, Aspects of Cognitive Ethnolinguistics (pp. 1-5). Sheffield and Oakville, CT: Equinox.

Translated by Adam Głaz

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Chapter 9 The cognitive definition of iron (żelazo) in Polish folk tradition

Katarzyna Prorok and Adam Głaz UMCS, Lublin, Poland

1. General assumptions

The chapter is an attempt to reconstruct the linguistic portrait of iron (żelazo) entrenched in Polish folk culture.1 The linguistic (linguistic-cultural) worldview is one of the main concepts of ethnolinguistics. In the Lublin approach, represented by Jerzy Bartmiński and his team, ethnolinguistics is treated as the area within contemporary linguistics that aims to reconstruct the subjective worldview entrenched in language by focusing on “culture in language.” Bartmiński claims that the relative uniqueness of Lublin ethnolinguistics results not so much from a continuation of previous research or from sources of inspiration, but from its research instruments, i.e. the terms and concepts it uses:

In general, they are the same as those in cultural, anthropological and cognitive linguistics, but they are also somewhat different from

1 In Poland, the term “folk culture” is attributed to the culture typical of peasant communities. Among its characteristic features are: isolationism, traditionalism, an oral form of transmission of knowledge and tradition, sensuality, and a specific type of religiousness (Burszta, 1999, pp. 116-118). Bartmiński says: Folk culture, peasant folklore, or regional dialects have for centuries served as the bedrock of national culture, a source of literary inspirations and the source power for national language, both in its colloquial and artistic variants. [...] The boundary between what is folk and what is national was not and is not sharp. On the contrary, both spheres of national culture have permeated each other for a long time. Historically speaking, standard Polish emerged between the 14th and the 16th c.; it is founded on folk dialects and in later centuries the process of borrowings and diffusion involved single words and concepts, but also phrases, idioms, proverbs, topics, and motifs, as well as whole texts. (SSSL, 1996-2012, vol. I, no. 1, p. 10) Hence in SSSL (Dictionary of Folk Stereotypes and Symbols) there is no sharp boundary between folk and non-folk sources: “[W]e have decided to show as widely and systematically as possible the relationship between folk culture and primarily colloquial thinking entrenched in standard, spoken variety of Polish” (Bartmiński 2000, p. 49). The problems of folk vs. non-folk culture in the context of ethnolinguistic research are discussed, among others, in Prorok (2012).

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the latter, and in any case, they are sometimes understood and used in an idiosyncratic manner. Together they form a coherent system of concepts useful in descriptions of language in its various social manifestations, so they are certainly valuable in the operational sense. They include not only the idea of the linguistic worldview, but also such concepts as type of rationality, viewpoint and perspective, the understanding of text as a specifically structured “macro-sign,” colloquialness understood anthropologically as a common linguistic, cultural and experiential base, the stereotype that rest on this base, the idea of profiling concepts and stereotypes in specialized discourses, and finally the speaking subject, who communicates by controlling conceptualization, verbalization, and profiling. (Bartmiński, 2008, p. 23)

We will try to reconstruct the linguistic picture of iron following the methodology used in the Dictionary of Folk Stereotypes and Symbols (SSSL, 1996-2012), the main project of Lublin ethnolinguistics. The aim of the dictionary is to reconstruct the traditional picture of the world and of humans in that world, accessible through language, texts of folklore, and descriptions of beliefs and practices. The method of defining used in the dictionary is that of the cognitive definition, which significantly differs from the known ways of defining adopted in lexicography. Its assumptions are formulated by Bartmiński as follows:

The cognitive definition aims to portray the way in which an entity is viewed by the speakers of a language, to represent socio- culturally established and linguistically entrenched knowledge, its categorisation and valuation. [...] The defined entity is a “mental object” (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 67), [with the whole richness of its characterization, entrenched in the linguistic worldview (Bartmiński, 1988, p. 170).]

The cognitive definition reconstructs colloquial2 thinking about the world and strives to extract all established and culturally relevant positive features of a given mental object. This makes it different from the typical, classical definition, which is limited to an enumeration of only some of these features, namely those

2 The cognitive definition can be applied “narrowly,” i.e. to account for folk language, or “broadly,” i.e. with regard to a standard, national language and even in intercultural research. For example, Bartmiński (2009/2012, ch. 11) applies it at the level of the standard variety of Polish. For a discussion of the problem of a “broad” or “narrow” understanding of ethnolinguistics cf. Bartmiński (2009/2012, pp. 9-10) or Prorok (2012).

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that identify the object being defined (genus proximum) and distinguish it form others (differentia specifica). In most “academic” dictionaries, one easily finds definitions that make ample use of scientific knowledge. As an example, let us consider Witold Doroszewski’s Dictionary of the Polish Language (SJP, 1958- 1969), which influenced the shape of Polish lexicography for years to come. According to Doroszewski, a good definition is one in which the entry word can be replaced by the actual definition without altering the sense of the whole. Let us see how he defines żelazo:

1. a chemical element, symbol Fe, atomic number 26, a heavy, malleable, soft metal, with magnetic properties; in nature it appears in compounds with oxygen and sulfur; used as raw material in heavy industry; 2. carbon steel, an alloy of iron and carbon; a piece of this alloy; 3. a large iron object or instrument

As separate meanings Doroszewski distinguishes also:

4. a trap for animals, iron hoops snapped by means of a spring; 5 a) a suit of armor; b) cold steel, a sword; 6 a) chains, handcuffs; b) an iron

However, meanings 4 to 6 are merely special cases of meaning 3. This definition has a specialized character. Two kinds of categorization are introduced: ‘chemical element’ and ‘heavy metal.’ The former results from the scientific point of view and contains information important only for a scientist (a chemist), not for an average speaker, e.g. about the element’s atomic number.3 The category ‘metal’ situates the entity closer to colloquial knowledge and implies characterization of its properties and use. But even here one finds specialized and scientific terms, such asmalleability or magnetic properties. Also surprising to an average reader is the information that iron is a soft metal, since in everyday conceptualization it is a synonym for hardness; cf. the expressions

3 This is obviously not typical of Polish lexicography only; cf. even more “scientific” definitions of iron at www.collinsdictionary.com: a malleable ductile silvery-white ferromagnetic metallic element occurring principally in haematite and magnetite. It is widely used for structural and engineering purposes. Symbol: Fe; atomic no: 26; atomic wt: 55.847; valency: 2,3,4, or 6; relative density: 7.874; melting pt: 1538°C; boiling pt: 2862°C or at www.dictionary.com: a ductile, malleable, silver-white metallic element, scarcely known in a pure condition, but much used in its crude or impure carbon-containing forms for making tools, implements, machinery, etc. Symbol: Fe; atomic weight: 55.847; atomic number: 26; specific gravity: 7.86 at 20°C.

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twardy jak żelazo ‘hard as iron,’ żelazna ręka ‘iron hand,’ or żelazny człowiek ‘iron man,’ etc. Doroszewski used scientific terms in order to approach objectivity but he associated objectivity with scientific knowledge, rather than with colloquial, common-sense knowledge. In contrast, according to Bartmiński,

a move from what is subjective to what is objective is by no means tantamount to a move from everyday to scientific knowledge, and this for two reasons: (1) even if scientific knowledge is oriented towards maximum objectivity, one cannot disregard objective elements in common knowledge beside subjective ones; (2) an assessment of the subjective or objective character of knowledge can take place only when the same type of rationality and the same attitude toward the world are assumed. Common knowledge has its source in a different attitude (pragmatic, common-sense) than scientific knowledge (theoretical and epistemological), and therefore to assess the objectivity of one from the viewpoint of the other is unjustified. (Bartmiński, 2006, p. 36)

Anna Wierzbicka draws attention to the same problem:

A good dictionary definition must be exhaustive in the sense that it states all the components of the concept, not in the sense that it includes all the available knowledge about the denotata. No knowledge of the denotata should be included in a definition unless it has become part of the concept. The dividing line is clear, at least in principle: no specialized knowledge can be regarded as part of the meaning. In other words, no facts about mugs that only potters would know should be included in the definition ofmug , and no facts that only zoologists would know should be included in the definition of tiger. A zoologist or a zoo-keeper might know how many teeth a tiger has, but one can know what tiger means without having that information. (Wierzbicka, 1985, pp. 40-41)

Similarly, for an ordinary speaker the atomic number of iron and its chemical symbol are not relevant; more important are its appearance, properties, and use. The authors of other dictionaries of Polish follow Doroszewski’s definitions and frequently resort to specialist terminology. Stanisław Dubisz in his Universal Dictionary of the Polish Language (USJP, 2003) uses such “learned” terms as ferrous group, oxidation, or hemoglobin. In Halina Zgółkowa’s Practical Dictionary of Contemporary Polish Language (PSWP, 1994-2005), beside the colloquial information about the silvery-white color of iron and its shining surface can be

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found terms like periodic table, ductility, oxidation, diluted acids, and alkaline properties. Only two dictionaries of Polish break with the tradition of scientific definitions and use elements of colloquial knowledge. The first of those is Mirosław Bańko’s Different Polish Language Dictionary ISJP( , 2000), where żelazo is defined as “a heavy, silvery-grey metal used to produce alloys and in heavy industry; iron appears in the form of minerals and can be found in humans, animals, and plants.” Although the definition contains terms like alloy or minerals, it comes closest to the colloquial conceptualization of the world, thereby reconstructing the understanding of the meaning of żelazo by an average speaker.4 The other dictionary which refers to the speakers’ colloquial knowledge is Zofia Kurzowa’s Illustrated Basic Dictionary of the Polish Language (ISPJP, 1999), where żelazo is briefly defined as “a heavy metal, the main component of steel.” This definition only contains the superordinate category ‘metal,’ which is closer to the colloquial perception of the world, and only one feature, i.e. ‘heavy.’ At the same time, it contains the error ignotum per ignotius – “the unknown by the more unknown.” Describing iron through steel does not explain much because in the same dictionary stal ‘steel’ is defined as “hard metal obtained from iron”: a clear case of a vicious circle.5 To sum up: the quoted definitions have a taxonomic aim and follow the principles of the classical approach to defining. The superordinate category is determined mainly from the scientific point of view. These minimal definitions are limited to the “necessary and sufficient” features, they have a classifying character and are good for taxonomic purposes. For descriptive purposes, however, they are insufficient because they do not shed light on the understanding of words by average speakers or the meanings of texts, phrases, and proverbs, such as kuć żelazo póki gorące ‘strike while the iron is hot.’ At this juncture, two questions can be asked: how many features should the “maximum” definition take into account and is the set of these features closed? Bartmiński answers thus:

4 Cf. the strikingly similar definition of iron in the Collins Cobuild dictionary at www. mycobuild.com: “Iron is an element which usually takes the form of a hard, dark-grey metal. It is used to make steel, and also forms part of many tools, buildings, and vehicles. Very small amounts of iron occur in your blood and in food.” It is worth mentioning that in the preface to ISJP (2000) Bańko writes: “[T]he compilation [of the dictionary] has been inspired by British pedagogical dictionaries (especially those published by Collins, later HarperCollins) designed for learners of English as a foreign language” (p. v). He does not mention any specific dictionary but the similarity to Collins Cobuild is incontestable. 5 Note that the same error can be found in the Collins Cobuild definition of steel: “Steel is a very strong metal which is made mainly from iron. Steel is used for making many things, for example bridges, buildings, vehicles, and cutlery” (compare this with the definition of iron in the previous note).

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There is no reason why lexicographic explanation of a word could not collect all positive components of its meaning relevant from the point of view of the word’s use in texts and its relation to other words in the language. The number of properties associated with the object being defined would grow significantly but at the same time it wouldbe limited to what is registered by the colloquial awareness of speakers, not by scientific knowledge about the world. (Bartmiński, 2006, pp. 40-41; cf. also Bartmiński, 2009/2012, pp. 71-72)

However, does not the postulate of the “maximum” definition transform a lexicographic definition into an encyclopedic one? Not really, because the Lublin ethnolinguists attempt to keep their extended cognitive definitions within the limits of “linguistic evidence” (cf. Wierzbicka, 1996, p.. 335ff. for a more in-depth discussion of the latter term). In the cognitive definition, the set of features relating to a given object is “in principle” closed,6 their number being primarily determined by linguistic and cultural stability (never 100%). An important aspect is, firstly, the semantic content of the word’s core meaning, and secondly, the socio-cultural context, i.e. socially entrenched knowledge of the world, common to the sender and the receiver (this is usually a peripheral sphere of meaning, the so-called “soft connotations”), accompanied by convictions, beliefs, and established practices, without which normal language communication and interpretation of utterances is impossible. These are the so-called “co-linguistic data” (cf. Bartmiński, 2009/2012, pp. 9, 11, 34-35).7 Therefore, during the reconstruction of the “naive worldview,” three types of data are taken into account, abbreviated as S–Q–T: the language system, questionnaires, and texts. This, however, is not a sine qua non requirement, cf. Bartmiński (2009/2012, p. 36 and chapters 11-16) for various configurations of the three kinds of sources. The notion and use of co-linguistic data involves a certain paradox, for how does one reconcile the desire to avoid all-embracing, unlimited and diffuse encyclopedic-type definitions (cf. Wierzbicka above) with incorporating the data into the definitions? If by being encyclopedic one understands the totality of (conscious or subconscious) knowledge about a given object or phenomenon, then this is not what Lublin ethnolinguistics stands for, as this would preclude defining anything. It appears that this is precisely Wierzbicka’s point (1996, pp. 335-336) when she argues in favor of extensive but precise and rigorously executed definitions. But

6 The principles of the cognitive definition were formulated in the 1980s but later publications (e.g. Bartmiński & Tokarski, 1993) emphasize the definition’s open character. 7 Called ad-linguistic in that book.

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it is a different matter to seek support for linguistic evidence in the data that is in itself non-linguistic but that both accompanies and sheds light on language use. This is the “socio-cultural” context we have mentioned, the “socially entrenched knowledge of the world.” Lublin ethnolinguistics follows in this respect Malinowski’s (1935) idea of language as primarily a “mode of action.”8 It is through and by means of language that “things get done” not only in individual face-to-face encounters between speakers (cf. the later theory of speech acts) but primarily in communal joint efforts conventionalized in the form of practices, rituals, or stereotyped behaviors. Language accompanies those behaviors but the reverse is also true, hence “both types of data complement each other and facilitate a comprehensive reconstruction [of a given mental image] that exists in the consciousness of the participants in folk culture” (Prorok, 2012, p. 39). Importantly, Lublin ethnolinguistics goes further than Malinowski and accepts what is referred to as “the cognitive commitment,” i.e. “a commitment to providing a characterization of general principles for language that accords with what is known about the mind” (Evans & Green, 2006, pp. 27-28). In particular, the alternative between cultural practice and mental process is a fallacy: one does not preclude the other. Indeed, the very thrust of cognitive ethnolinguistics is a quest for mental portraits of objects and phenomena that are common to members of a given community who are engaged in certain communal practices. The mental portraits both reflect and shape these practices. In the following section we will present the cognitive definition of iron as it is conceptualized in Polish folk culture.9 It will consist of two parts: explication (section 2) and documentation (the Appendix). In the explication, the stabilized characteristics that iron receives in the Polish folk language will be given in the form of “defining sentences.” These sentences will be arranged in special semantic categories (facets), that is, groups treated as homogenous from a certain

8 Malinowski (1935) attributes the pragmatic function to any language. This is a development of his earlier view (1923) that the function, in tandem with the so-called “context of situation,” is primarily found in the so-called “primitive” languages. 9 Because of length limitations here, we will only present a shortened version of the definition. The full version, authored by Katarzyna Prorok and Małgorzata Brzozowska, can be found in SSSL (vol. 1, no. 4: The world, light, metals, 2012). The documentary part there contains a few hundred texts representing various genres. The texts were first grouped into variants, and then “stereotypical motifs” in the form of sentences (or their equivalents) were extracted from them. These were used in the explication as “defining sentences.” In addition, twenty-four sub-entries have been formulated: these contain definitions of selected iron objects (e.g. an iron, an iron horseshoe, an iron bridge, iron shoes). Their cultural portraits are presented separately because they have complex semantics and are involved in a variety of genre-related contexts: the connotations of iron as a metal interplay or overlap with those of concrete objects and their names. In this way, complex, new symbolic qualities emerge.

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point of view: names, categorization, complexes and collections, oppositions and gradation, origin, transformation, appearance and properties, or actions directed at iron. We will also present prohibitions and divinations associated with iron, its everyday, medicinal and magic uses, and finally we will list its symbolic meanings. These categories reflect the cognitive structure of the entry and the way in which the word żelazo functions in texts. The documentation will contain various types of “stereotyped texts” (stabilized in terms of their semantic and/or formal structure and repetitive in social circulation), such as riddles, proverbs, spells, New Year carols, various types of folk songs (wedding, love, religious, festive, soldiers’, or profession songs), fairy tales, written peasant poetry, and descriptions of beliefs and practices. They come both from 19th-c. or earlier sources and newly created folk colloquial data, collected in fieldwork and deposited in the Ethnolinguistic Archive at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin. Their geographical scope embraces the whole ethnic territory of Poland.

2. Explication

NAME. The Polish name of iron, żelazo, has close counterparts in other Slavic languages (Czech železo, Slovak železo, Russian želézo, Ukrainian zalízo, zelizo, Bulgarian żelázo, Serbian/Croatian žèljezo, Slovenian želézo) and Baltic languages (Lithuanian geležis, Latvian dzèlzs). Etymologically related (formally and semantically) with żelazo are the Polish words głaz ‘boulder,’ głowa ‘head’ and żółw ‘turtle’ (Old Church Slavonic žely), as well as Russian želevák ‘tumor,’ which shows that the dominant feature of iron, entrenched in its name, is hardness. Other words derived from the noun żelazo not only emphasize its hardness, but also its strength and dark-gray color. The adjective żelazny ‘iron,’ besides the purely relational meaning ‘related with iron’ or ‘made ​​of iron,’ has qualitative meanings ‘in some aspect similar to iron,’ therefore ‘hard and durable as iron,’ ‘having the color of iron.’ Furthermore, as a result of metaphorical extensions from the physical sphere to the psycho-social sphere, żelazny has meanings that refer to human behaviors: ‘inviolable, unchanging,’ ‘ruthless, adamant,’ cf. the expressions ktoś trzyma kogoś żelazną ręką ‘someone keeps somebody with an iron fist,’ żelazny człowiek ‘iron man,’ żelazna wola ‘iron will,’ żelazne prawo ‘iron law.’ In Polish folk tradition żelazny also means ‘constant, not belonging to someone, but to a certain institution (e.g. a parish) or given to someone for life,’ e.g. żelazna krowa ‘an iron cow,’ żelazne mleko ‘iron milk,’ żelazny opał ‘iron firewood.’ Slow-growing and ripening fruits were also calledżelazny : ‘the apples are still iron and one could break teeth on them’; żelåznica ‘a winter pear or apple.’ Other derived words are less interesting because they show only the use of iron as a material: żelaźniak ‘an iron pot,’ ‘a wagon with an iron fitting’;żelazko ‘an iron,’ ‘an iron tool or dish,’ ‘a tool for ironing fabrics, once heated by a bar of

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iron (the “soul”) or glowing embers that were put inside, today by electricity’; żelastwo ‘scrap-iron,’ ‘pieces of iron, iron objects, especially old, unfit to use, intended for scrap.’ SUPERORDINATE CATEGORY. In Polish folk tradition iron is treated as a metal. Although the word metal in itself occurs rarely, it is commonly known and understood. Steel, i.e. iron merged with carbon in appropriate proportions, is treated as a VARIETY of iron. In folk texts, steel appears interchangeably with iron or next to it, especially when one wants to emphasize the feature of hardness, cf. the expression żelazne/stalowe nerwy ‘iron/steel nerves’; a proverb mentions ‘iron steel’ (2);10 in a poem a blacksmith forges ‘iron, hard steel’ (47); in a wedding song a girl wants to dance, because her legs ‘are made of iron, of steel’ (26). Iron appears in COMPLEXES AND COLLECTIONS with various materials, e.g.: with gold, silver and copper which a miner mines from the ground (35); iron and flint are used to make fire; iron and a magnet attract each other (22) (a) (b), (30); iron with wood form tools (1); in fire iron is heated before forging (5) (a), (29), (37); a hammer and a bellows are needed in the forging of iron (47). In a proverb, in a metaphorical sense as weapon (a symbol of fighting), iron is connected with bread because they both help one survive (20), and with valor, because they are essential in war (14). Iron also stands in OPPOSITION to other materials. On the one hand, it is considered less valuable and precious than gold or silver (11), (41), (42). On the other hand, it is more useful than they are: gold (i.e. wealth) loses its value during the war, which is fought with iron, a symbol of military force (15), (17). Hard, heavy and resistant iron is also opposed to the softer, lighter and non- resistant materials: lead (39), clay and glass (21), phloem (13), down (3) and feathers (4), silk (10), bread (56). In the metaphorical sense it is weaker than: a tongue that ‘injures more than iron’ (28), a hand that is ‘harder than iron’ (3), an unfeeling heart (19). GRADATION. In the religious songs which draw on the ancient tradition (Greek and Latin), gold – silver – copper – iron and clay function as signs of four centuries in the world history (31). This series is built on the principle “better – worse.” The ORIGIN of iron can be heavenly or earthly. According to the oldest, mythologized verbal transmissions, today rare, iron originates in heaven: God flings a lightning, i.e. a glowing piece of iron, which falls deep into the ground and then it is found as a ‘thundering stone.’ In fairy tales iron may be a result of magic TRANSFORMATION (42), or it is transformed into more valuable silver

10 The numbers in the brackets refer to the numbers in the documentation in the Appendix.

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and gold (41). According to a legend, the iron mine near Łęczyca, Poland, came into being when the devil, in order to marry the daughter of a stingy blacksmith, brought him a pile of iron higher than the forge. When the clever daughter of the blacksmith told the devil to come to the church for the wedding, he escaped, and the iron caved in deeply into the ground. Mining songs are more realistic: iron is mined from the ground by a miner (35), (36). FORMS OF OCCURRENCE. Iron occurs in the form of ores (called żelaziak, żeleziak, żelazisko ‘iron stone’), which are mined from the underground. Steel works, factories and forges (called hamernie from German) were built in the vicinity: iron was processed there. Ethnographic descriptions also mention ‘iron water’ or ‘iron springs,’ which contain minerals. Kashubian żelezna is ‘water containing a high percentage of iron.’ APPEARANCE AND PROPERTIES. Iron is perceived as a metal that is: (I) hard: twardy jak żelazo ‘hard as iron,’ muskuły z żelaza ‘muscles of iron,’ cf. (3), (11), (28), (39), (47); (II) heavy: ciężki jak żelazo ‘heavy as iron,’ cf. (4); (III) durable: żelazne zdrowie ‘iron health,’ człowiek z żelaza ‘iron man’; in fairy tales a man stronger than all the others is called Żelazny Marcin ‘Iron Martin,’ cf. (2), (11), (26); (IV) rigid: in a wedding song bridesmaids do not sing because they have ‘iron or wooden mugs’ (27). Iron has a dark gray color (which is confirmed by the wordżelazisty ‘ferruginous,’ ‘similar in appearance to the iron, distinguished by a dark gray metallic color’), but it changes during heating from red to white (38). Underground deposits of iron give water its red color – the water is used in baking iron clay vessels. Rusty iron has red-brown color and so was used to color eggs for Easter. In its natural state iron is cold, but when heated in fire it is very hot (6), (29), gives warmth (38) and one can knead it like dough (47). Iron rusts when it is exposed to air and water: jeść jak rdza żelazo ‘to eat (something) like rust eats iron,’ cf. (7) (a) (b). It should be gilded (8) or oiled (32) to protect it from rust. When iron is made to rasp on glass, the sound is very unpleasant, cf. the expression jak zgrzyt żelaza po szkle ‘as the rasp of iron on glass.’ ACTIONS DIRECTED AT IRON may have a purely utilitarian or a magic goal. A miner mines it from the ground (35), (36), a steelworker melts it from the ore, and a blacksmith heats it in fire, then forges and tempers it (5) (a) (b), (25), (37), (38), (47). Hard and durable iron cannot simply be broken (19) or crumbled (5) (a). Therefore, if in fairy tales strong men are called Łomiżelazo ‘breaking- iron,’ Żelazołom, ‘iron-crowbar,’ it is the measure of their uniqueness. According to some beliefs, pstruś ‘an ostrich’ is a unique bird that eats and digests iron. Objects made of iron can be torn, worn away only in special circumstances: after sprinkling them with holy water, circling with chalk, touching with a cane from a

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paradise tree or with special herbs with significant names, such as rozryw-ziele ‘tear-herbs,’ trawa żelazna ‘iron grass,’ żelazne ziele ‘iron herb.’ Hot iron is used as an instrument of torture and punishment, cf. the expressions próba rozpalonego żelaza ‘trial by hot iron,’ piec/przypiekać kogoś rozpalonym żelazem ‘to burn someone with red-hot iron,’ cf. (40), (45). According to beliefs the ‘Iron Hand’ (43) and the ‘Iron Woman’ with iron claws (44) spread fear among children and bring death to them. DAILY USE. Thanks to its hardness, durability and wide availability, iron has had numerous practical applications. Many useful tools are made of iron, especially those that are essential in farming and at home (plows, harrows, sickles, scythes, axes, wagons, chains, nails, stoves, chests, pots, knives), various types of locks (keys, padlocks, locks, doors, gates, bars, walls, chains, tethers, snares), tools of war and violence (weapons, armor), etc. Iron objects with time replaced their earlier, less durable wooden equivalents. The older generation reconciled themselves to the changes reluctantly. For example, older Polish country-dwellers ate with wooden spoons until the end of the nineteenth century and even up to World War I, while young people used iron spoons. Iron objects are produced by a local blacksmith. He usually remakes the metal tools collected in farms into new ones. Many archaic MEDICAL AND MAGIC PRACTICES related to the use of iron objects have been noted, which confirms the mythological nature of the portrait of iron in folk tradition. It is commonly believed that iron provides health and success, or protects against witchcraft and the powers of evil. At Christmas Eve supper iron was put on feet to make them hard, to protect them from ulcers or in general for one ‘to be as healthy as iron’ cf. (25). People applied scraps of iron from a forge on the painful part of the body or rubbed boiled scraps of iron into their skin as treatment for rheumatism. For the same purpose they put various objects made ​​of steel or iron into bed. Pebbles, pieces of bones or iron functioned as amulets. They were worn around the neck, under an arm or sewed in dresses as protection against misfortunes, diseases, influences of witches and spells of bad people. For example, in a special formula the ‘iron man’ chases people’s fright away (24). Iron was also put in the covers of a newborn child and its mother to protect them from troublesome witches. By means of iron cooked in milk or by means of heated iron on which milk was poured, people invoked and tortured the witch that had spoiled their cow’s milk. If a deceased person was suspected of being a vampire, a piece of iron was inserted into his mouth so that he could not get up (46). On St. John the Baptist’s Eve each farmer emptied his well of water and cleaned it thoroughly; at the end he threw a little salt or a piece of iron into it, believing that it will help the well produce healthy water all year. On Christmas Eve iron was placed under the table to protect the ground against moles. In order to protect sauerkraut from going bad, a piece of iron was put into a barrel.

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There were also certain PROHIBITIONS associated with iron, which concerned mainly the iron tools used in farming. It was believed that they can hurt the earth, the living mother, e.g. iron forks were not used for fear that the earth will stop bearing fruit. Iron was also used in DIVINATIONS. When someone found a needle or another iron object, it was treated as the sign that on that day the person had not sinned. After the Christmas Eve supper, girls went to the river and whichever of them found a piece of iron, she would have a blacksmith for the husband. SYMBOLIC MEANINGS attributed to iron in the Polish folk tradition do not differ significantly from its meanings in other cultures. Thanks to its physical properties, iron symbolizes hardness (3), (28), (39), (47), durability (2), (26), power (24), implacability and valor (9), (10), (14). As a weapon of war it is also connected with captivity (33) (a), (b),​​ (34) and death (48). A dream about iron is treated as a prophecy of ‘hard experiences’ because ‘iron is heavy.’11

3. Summary

The cognitive definition of iron in SSSL (vol. I, no. 4) is very complex because it takes into account all culturally relevant positive features of the mental object. On the one hand, there are features for which one can find linguistic evidence, i.e. the fact that iron is a hard, heavy and durable metal; it has a dark-gray color and is cold; it is considered to be less precious than gold, silver or even copper but people appreciate its greater usefulness in everyday life, etc. On the other hand, according to folk tradition entrenched in beliefs and practices, i.e. “co- linguistic data” that have no direct formal linguistic exponents, iron is also a means of protection against the powers of evil and provides health to people and livestock. Both types of data – linguistic and “co-linguistic” – complement each other and enable a comprehensive reconstruction of the folk image of iron.

11 This rests on the ambiguity of the Polish word ciężki, which can mean either ‘hard’ (as in hard experience) or ‘heavy’ (in the literal sense, ‘weighing much’).

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References

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (1988). Definicja kognitywna jako narzędzie opisu konotacji. In Jerzy Bartmiński (Ed.), Konotacja (pp. 169-183). Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (2000). Odpowiedź na uwagi o „Słowniku stereotypów i symboli ludowych”. Literatura Ludowa, 1, 48-52.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (2006). Językowe podstawy obrazu świata. Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (2007). Stereotypy mieszkają w języku. Studia etnolingwistyczne. Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (2008). Etnolingwistyka, lingwistyka kulturowa, lingwistyka antropologiczna? Język a Kultura 20, (pp. 15-33). Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (2009/2012). Aspects of Cognitive Ethnolinguistics. Ed. Jörg Zinken. Sheffield and Oakville, CT: Equinox.

Bartmiński, Jerzy, & Tokarski, Ryszard. (1993). Definicja semantyczna: czego i dla kogo? In Jerzy Bartmiński & Ryszard Tokarski (Eds.), O definicjach i definiowaniu (pp. 47-61). Lublin: UMCS.

Burszta, Wojciech. (1999). Kultura ludowa. In Encyklopedia socjologii, vol. 2. Editorial board Zbigniew Bokszański et al. Ed. Henryk Domański et al. (pp. 116- 118). Warszawa: Oficyna Naukowa.

Evans. Vyvyan, & Green, Melanie C. (2006). Cognitive Linguistics: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Malinowski, Bronislaw. (1923). The problem of meaning in primitive languages. In C. K. Ogden & I. A. Richards (Eds.), The Meaning of Meaning (pp. 296-336). New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc.

Malinowski, Bronislaw. (1935). Coral Gardens and their Magic. 2 vols. London: Allan and Unwin.

Prorok, Katarzyna. (2012). Językowo-kulturowy obraz metali (złoto, srebro, żelazo, ołów) w polskiej tradycji ludowej. Doctoral dissertation. Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin, Poland.

ISJP. (2000). Inny słownik języka polskiego. Ed. Mirosław Bańko. Warszawa: PWN.

ISPJP. (1999). Ilustrowany słownik podstawowy języka polskiego wraz z indeksem pojęciowym wyrazów i ich znaczeń. Ed. Z. Kurzowa. Kraków: Universitas.

PSWP. (1994-2005). Praktyczny słownik współczesnej polszczyzny. Ed. Halina Zgółkowa. Poznań: Kurpisz.

SJP. (1958-1969). Słownik języka polskiego PAN. Ed. Witold Doroszewski. Warszawa: PWN.

SSSL. (1996-2012). Słownik stereotypów i symboli ludowych. Vol. I, nos. 1-4. Ed. Jerzy Bartmiński & Stanisława Niebrzegowska-Bartmińska. Lublin: UMCS.

USJP. (2003). Uniwersalny słownik języka polskiego. Ed. Stanisław Dubisz. Warszawa: PWN.

Wierzbicka, Anna (1985). Lexicography and Conceptual Analysis. Ann Arbor: Karoma Publishers.

Wierzbicka, Anna. (2006). Semantics. Primes and Universals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Appendix Documentation12

Riddles (1) Wood with iron together form 7. (The scythe) (2) What is stronger than iron steel? (Fire) (3) What is harder than iron and softer than down? (A hand) (4) What is heavier: a pound of iron, or a pound of feather? (Neither: it makes no difference)

Proverbs (5) (a) Strike while the iron is hot; variants: Strike while the iron is in the fire; Beat while the iron is hot; Strike while the iron is hot: cold iron crumbles. (b) At first the blacksmith heats the iron, and then he forges it. (6) Only millstones and hot iron are safe from a thief. (7) (a) Rust digests iron, concern digests man. (b) A jealous man is like iron: his own rust digests him. (8) Gilded iron does not rust quickly. (9) Choose a friend with a silk hand and hold them with an iron hand. (10) Iron law but golden letters. (11) A gold(en) fist breaks the iron wall. (12) Iron peace is better than gold(en) war. (13) Phloem agreement is better than iron law. (14) With iron and valor wars are waged. (15) Go gold to gold, we, Poles, love iron more. (16) Poland will never run out of iron for weapons, knights for horseriding, rye, flax, wheat and cellars full of wine. (17) What are good outfits for in the war, where iron pays, and gold and jewels lose their value. (18) A tongue injures more than iron. (19) It is easier to crush iron than an unfeeling heart. (20) With iron and bread we will go all over the world. (21) Fortune changes often: one time it is clay, then iron, then glass. (22) (a) Four eyes together are (like) a magnet and iron. (b) It attracts [things] to itself like a magnet does iron.

12 All references to the sources of examples have been omitted but can be found in SSSL (2012, vol. I, no. 4, pp. 333-363). Most of these texts are written in the folk dialect whose form cannot be adequately rendered in translation.

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Medical formulas and spells (23) When a baby loses its tooth, he/she has to throw it into the mousehole saying these words: “Little mouse, little mouse, take my bone tooth and give me an iron tooth” – then he/she will never have a toothache. (24) When someone is suffering from fright, one should say these words: “A man goes into the forest, he has an ax behind his belt, an iron cap, an iron shirt, an iron belt, iron pants, iron shoes, everything on him is iron. Oh, fright, fright! Go to the woods, forests, dry roots, where no man or creature can go.”

New Year carols (25) Come on, Mary, into the house, you have so many guests in the house: the carpenter, the bricklayer and the blacksmith. Mommy, these guys are not for me. The blacksmith has an iron heart, I don’t want such a husband, he just strikes iron and will not respect his wife.

Wedding songs (26) [A girl sings:] You, who are playing now, if you can, do not save my legs, because my legs are made of iron, they do not need a doctor, my legs are made of steel, when one plays to them, they dance. (27) Bridesmaids, why aren’t you singing? Are your mugs made of iron? Are they iron or wooden or locked with pegs? (28) Marry, you didn’t want wheat bread and now you will (have to) bite hard iron; Marry, you will not carry water in a bucket because you will have enough water under your eyes.

Love songs (29) My heart is as sorrowful as iron heated in fire. (30) I will love you till I die, you have an iron heart, of magnet is mine.

Religious songs (31) Four stages have been inscribed in the world’s history: the first years were gold, then silver years went by. The third age was copper; the worst is our time, a mixture of iron and clay.

Festive songs (32) If you drink, drink well, then eat something, then drink again. Because alcohol preserves, do not be surprised, iron must be oiled not to rust.

Soldiers’ songs (33) (a) The platoon went to combat like to a ball, carrying a song of bullets. Through blood and fire, close behind the enemy, who imprisoned the country in iron. [i.e. iron chains]

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(b) We gathered in the forest, let’s stay together, because our homeland is imprisoned in iron. (34) When they recruit us to the army, they promise us mountains of gold; when they give us iron [i.e. iron weapon], they take away our health.

Profession songs (35) A nobleman, a craftsman, all classes thanks to the miner’s hands have gold, silver, iron, copper and coal; a miner has to mine them from the ground. (36) A farmer could not plow the land if a miner had not dug ore for him from the ground; so a miner can be useful, for you, peasant. (37) A blacksmith knows about iron, he puts it into the fire and lights it at once. What he wants he can forge, and he tempers it as needed. (38) [A miner sings:] Red iron, you’re white when you are melted, you’re laughing at me, warming me with your warmth.

Fairy tales (39) [Brothers are fighting against a witch for the release of their sister.] When they breathed on her, the ground under her became ​​iron; then she breathed on them, the ground under them became lead. When they began to fight and fight and fight, they were buried to knees to their lead ground, and under it you can barely see traces of feet. (40) [Devils are trying to force a boy into speaking for two nights. On the third night] they came in a triple number, they brought hot iron with them and jabbed it straight to his heart, so that he shouted in pain: Oh, Jesus! (41) [A poor boy frees spirit from a bottle.] The spirit gratefully gave him a piece of cloth and told him that when he rides over one of its sides, the largest vacuum will fill up, and when he rides over the other side, at once iron will change into gold and silver. (42) [When a blacksmith curses his fate, the devil plants a golden rail on him. The blacksmith together with a Jew make rings from this gold. But unfortunately, in the hands of buyers the rings change back into iron.]

Descriptions of beliefs and practices (43) Everybody who lives here tells about the Iron Hand and then we are in fear and no one can sleep. The Iron Hand can go through a wall, window, door, and no one can stop it. It strangles people but only children. (44) They said: do not look into a well because the Iron Woman sits there. She has iron claws and will pull you into the well, and you will not be here. You will drown. Therefore, children were afraid. They steered clear of the well. (45) You can hang yourself even while sitting... Then the most beautiful music begins to play for you, the most exquisite and the most delicious food is presented before your eyes, which stimulates your nose and palate and it is set

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on a golden table; meanwhile the devil arrives and presses hot iron into your mouth. (46) I have heard that the body of the vampire that walked around the village has been unearthed. A piece of iron was inserted into his mouth so that he wouldn’t get up.

Written peasant poetry (47) Every day with a hammer on the anvil / I forge iron, hard steel. / ... In the sinewy arms like a pendulum / a heavy hammer rhythmically goes / Iron kneaded like a dough, / And from the dirty face sweat flows. (B. Pietrak) (48) Dear Poland! ... The three occupants like three vultures / tear you to pieces in struggle between each other / With violence, fire, blood, iron / The three destroy you as one. (J. J. Klich)

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Chapter 10 Stereotypes and values in the linguistic worldview

Stanisława Niebrzegowska-Bartmińska UMCS, Lublin, Poland

1. Stereotypes and values: an overview

Ethnolinguistics investigates language in its relation to culture, group mentality, people’s beliefs and behaviors. Lublin ethnolinguistics, sometimes called cognitive (Nepop-Ajdaczyć, 2007; Vaňková, 2010; Zinken, 2009/2012), similarly to other Slavic ethnolinguistic schools (Nikita Tolstoy and Svetlana Tolstaya’s dialectological school, Vyacheslav Ivanov’s and Vladimir Toporov’s etymological school), relates to Wilhelm von Humboldt’s philosophy of language as well as to the ideas of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf in that it focuses on a reconstruction of the linguistic worldview, defined as an interpretation of the world contained in and accessible through language. In doing this, it follows the anthropological-cultural and cognitivist research paradigms. In describing the linguistic worldview, Bartmiński (2009/2012) and his collaborators introduced a few key “conceptual tools,” such as stereotype, the cognitive definition, profiling, viewpoint, the speaking subject, and values. Stereotypes are “segments” of the linguistic worldview, mental pictures of what something looks like, what it is like, how it functions (Lippmann, 1961 [1922]; Putnam, 1975). The cognitive definition is a tool for describing stereotypes: its role is to capture the language-entrenched categorization of phenomena, their characterizations and valuation, i.e. the way speakers understand a given entity. Profiling is a conceptual operation, performed in communicative acts, that consists in constructing variants of the base image of a given object. This is done with a certain intention and is definable in relation to styles and speech genres. A profile as a product of the profiling process (a variant of the base image) is constructed from a subjective viewpoint, from the position of the perceiving, categorizing, and speaking subject. For it is always the speaking subject that lurks behind a viewpoint: he/she acts, conceptualizes, and verbalizes thoughts in accordance with certain values important to him/her (or his/her community) and to the interlocutor. The present contribution aims to juxtapose two of the concepts mentioned above: stereotype and values. More precisely, it addresses a relationship that

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has so far received little attention, namely that between a speaking subject’s mental images and whatever is important to him/her. Both concepts are used in the Dictionary of Folk Stereotypes and Symbols (SSSL, 1996-2012), they are crucial to work on a Polish axiological dictionary (Bartmiński, 1989) and in the comparative research project EUROJOS (Bartmiński, 2005; Bartmiński & Chlebda, 2008; Abramowicz, Bartmiński, & Chlebda, 2009).1 Because in certain contexts the notions of value and stereotype function interchangeably (the stereotype of mother, homeland, work, but also mother, homeland or work as values), I will analyze their mutual relationship and propose to locate them anew in the framework of the linguistic worldview reconstruction. I assume that the linguistic worldview, as an interpretation of reality entrenched in and accessible via language (i.e. the language system and texts as manifestations of the system), contains both stereotypes and values, and these are inherited through the process of language acquisition. To paraphrase Bartmiński’s (2003) words, one may say that language is (i) a carrier of stereotypes and values, (ii) a source of information about them, and (iii) a tool for effecting the processes of stereotypization and valuation. I will examine the relationship between the two notions with the assumption that stereotypes are images of a given entity, that they are shaped in a certain socio-experiential frame, and that values are what is good and precious for an individual and his/her community. An attempt of this kind has already been made by Bartmiński & Panasiuk (1993), who identified four categories of stereotype with regard to the modal judgment associated with each: portraits, patterns, mythological images, ideological images (Table 10.1).

Table 10.1 Bartmiński and Panasiuk’s (1993) four categories of stereotype

type of modal portraits patterns mythological images ideological images judgment is + + may be + + should be + +

Portraits arise from the modal judgment X is (such and such), patterns from X should be, mythological images from X is and X may be, ideological images from X may be and X should be. Within this framework, stereotypes – being axiological

1 EUROJOS is an international comparative project affiliated with the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Its aim is to reconstruct the linguistic worldview(s) of Europeans. Cf. http://www.ispan.waw.pl/content/view/498/1/lang,pl_ PL.ISO8859-2/

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concepts – may doubtless be assigned to the last category, sometimes called “ideological stereotypes.” Examples include such concepts as EQUALITY, FREEDOM, SOLIDARITY, LOVE, TRUTH, HOMELAND, etc. They are both what “is possible” and postulated but also what “should be.” Ordinary intuition suggests, however, that a value for a subject can be something that has a basic ontological status, something that simply “is,” e.g. land, home, God – these are rather portraits (land), patterns (home), or mythological images (God). Therefore, in order to precisely capture the relationship between stereotypes and values, I will refer to descriptions of concepts that represent all the categories of the stereotypes listed above, such as FIRE, SUN, MOTHER, HOUSE/HOME, GOD, ANGEL, FREEDOM, EQUALITY.2 I will use the reconstructions proposed by various authors but effected with the same methodology and on the basis of comparable bodies of data. Cognitive ethnolinguists apply the same descriptive method to all categories of stereotype, namely the cognitive definition,3 which “aims to portray the way in which an entity is viewed by the speakers of a language, to represent socio-culturally established and linguistically entrenched knowledge, its categorisation and valuation” (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 67). Descriptions of stereotypes are based on three kinds of data: (i) the system of a language (i.e. the names of a given entity with regard to their internal form, metaphorization, derivatives, collocations and phraseological units); (ii) questionnaires and interviews collected in fieldwork; (iii) texts of various genres, from proverbs and other “stereotyped texts” to spontaneous, one-off texts excerpted from corpora of a given language and Internet search engines. Stabilized features, i.e. those that contribute to the linguistic (socially entrenched) image of the object,4 are excerpted from all three kinds of data. Judgments relating to the object, in the form of sentences or their textual equivalents, are grouped into homogeneous blocks (semantic subcategories), called facets: these are projections of the consciousness of language speakers and participants in a culture. They are not imposed on the data “from outside” but emerge from analysis and are thought of as reflecting native speakers’ intuitions.

2 Although these concepts bear English names here, the reconstruction concerns their Polish counterparts (see below). 3 The assumptions of the cognitive definition were first presented in Bartmiński (1988) and then applied in the SSSL dictionary (1996-2012), as well as in several articles, mainly in a volume edited by Bartmiński (1990) and in the journal Etnolingwistyka (Adamowski, 1992; Bartmiński & Majer-Baranowska, 1996; Bartmiński & Niebrzegowska, 1994; Maćkiewicz, 1990; Masłowska, 1990; Mazurkiewicz, 1990a,b; Niebrzegowska, 1990, 1992; cf. also Bartmiński or Prorok & Głaz this volume). Bartmiński & Tokarski (1993) point to the open nature of the cognitive definition. 4 Rather than “all associations” (Grzegorczykowa, 2010, p. 63).

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What images have so far been described in the ethnolinguistic literature and how do these descriptions depart from traditional lexicographic definitions? Representative of the latter are the definitions in Stanisław Dubisz’s Universal Dictionary of Polish (USJP, 2003), which follows the tradition of Witold Doroszewski’s now classic Dictionary of Polish (SJP, 1958-1969). I will juxtapose these with the most conspicuous characteristics derived from analyses of linguistic data.

2. Traditional lexicography vs. the cognitive definition: a few examples

SŁOŃCE ‘the Sun’ is defined in USJP (2003, vol. 4, p. 411) as “the star closest to the Earth, the central body in the Solar System, the main source of energy for the Earth, visible in the sky during the day as a fiery sphere.” In the cognitive definition, designed to reflect the Polish linguistic worldview (cf. Bartmiński & Niebrzegowska, 19965), the Sun is the biggest light in the sky, the source of light (cf. blask słońca ‘the Sun’s glare,’ słońce świeci ‘the Sun is shining’) and warmth (ciepło słoneczne ‘the Sun’s warmth,’ słońce gorące ‘the hot Sun,’ słońce piecze/ pali ‘the Sun beats down/burns’) whose movement in the sky marks the times of the day and whose location marks the directions (wschód ‘sunrise’ or ‘east,’ zachód ‘sunset’ or ‘west’). The Sun is bright (jasne jak słońce ‘as clear as day,’ lit. ‘as the Sun,’ jaśnieć jak słońce ‘to shine like the Sun’) and round (koło słoneczne ‘the ring of the Sun’; kula/krąg słońca ‘the sphere/ring of the Sun’); it is also mobile (wstaje ‘rises,’ zachodzi ‘sets’). Because it is the central point in the sky, the Sun symbolizes obviousness (być czegoś pewnym jak słońca na niebie, lit. ‘be sure of something as of the Sun in the sky’). Its characterization is supplemented with additional valuation: it becomes a symbol of perfection (plamy są i na słońcu, lit. ‘there are spots on the Sun, too’), happiness (słońce wolności ‘the Sun of freedom,’ promyk słońca ‘a ray of sunlight’) and joy (być komuś/dla kogoś słońcem ‘be (like) a ray of sunlight to someone’). People like the Sun (cf. terms of endearment słonko/ słoneczko ‘honey,’ lit. ‘little Sun’). It is associated with life (ujrzeć słońce ‘be born,’ lit. ‘see the Sun’; jego słońce już zaszło ‘he died,’ lit. ‘his Sun has set already’), and divinity (cf. Słońce sprawiedliwości ‘the Sun of justice’ in reference to Christ). OGIEŃ ‘fire’ in USJP (2003, vol. 3, p. 171) is defined as “flames and heat that are produced when something is burning.” In the cognitive definition, fire is

5 A comprehensive account of the characterization of the Sun in colloquial and folk Polish can also be found in Bartmiński & Niebrzegowska (1994). Both publications develop earlier proposals in Bartmiński (1980) and Niebrzegowska (1985).

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one of the “elements”; its characterization in the Polish linguistic worldview is very rich (cf. Szadura, 1996) and, similarly to other elements, ambivalent. On the one hand, fire gives warmth (grzeje) and is necessary for life; on the other hand, it is also a force that burns, devours, destroys (cf. bać się jak ognia, lit. ‘fear something like fire’; ogień walki ‘a ranging war,’ lit. ‘the fire of fight’; ogień grozy/niebezpieczeństw, lit. ‘the fire of terror/dangers’). Hence fire symbolizes passionate but destructive love (ogień miłości/pożądania/namiętności ‘the fire of love/desire/passion’), hatred and low instincts (ogień oburzenia/gniewu ‘the fire of indignation/anger’; ogień kogoś pożera/trawi ‘someone is devoured/consumed by fire’). According to colloquial and folk beliefs, fire is located not only on earth but also in the beyond: in heaven (ogień niebieski ‘heavenly fire’), in purgatory (ogień czyśćcowy ‘purgatorial fire’), and in hell (ogień piekielny ‘infernal fire’). The latter is taken to be punishment for one’s sins and an instrument of torment. DOM ‘house/home’ in USJP (2003, vol. 1, p. 652) is “a building assigned for apartments, offices, institutions,” “an apartment, one’s place,” “family, household; the apartment with its inhabitants.” In the cognitive definition, the Polish house/ home6 is a building (now also an apartment) used for living (dom mieszkalny, lit. ‘a house for living’), made of all kinds of materials (dom drewniany/betonowy/ kamienny ‘a wooden/concrete/stone house’), with its own appearance, i.e. shape and size (it may be parterowy ‘one-storey,’ piętrowy ‘multi-storey,’ niski ‘small,’ or wysoki ‘high’; cf. also drapacz chmur ‘sky-scraper,’ wieżowiec ‘high-rise,’ kamienica ‘tenement house,’ blok ‘apartment block,’ chata ‘hut,’ chałupa ‘shack, cabin’). It consists of such parts as dach ‘roof,’ ściany/mury ‘walls,’ okna ‘windows,’ drzwi ‘doors.’ In metaphorical extensions, the physical aspect disappears and the (psycho-)social aspect is augmented: it is also an institution (Dom Kultury ‘community center,’ lit. ‘the House of Culture’), whose functions may be social or custodial (dom poprawczy ‘borstal’), religious (dom modlitwy ‘House of Prayer,’ dom boży ‘church,’ lit. ‘the House of God’), or commercial (Dom Książki ‘bookstore,’ lit. ‘the House of the Book’). The Polish linguistic worldview contains the idea of building a house (budować/wznosić/stawiać dom ‘build/construct a house’7) and of the family as a community of person that live in it (dom ludzi ‘home full of people,’ Wójcicka z domu Krasnopolska ‘Wójcicka, maiden name

6 For a reconstruction of the concept in Polish cf. Bartmiński (1997) or Żywicka (2007, pp. 35-46). 7 Cf. also the etymology of the Proto-Indo-European word dom. The Greek dómos and Latin domus mean ‘house/home,’ ‘place to live,’ ‘family’; Latin dominus means ‘master of the house.’ The word links the meanings of ‘building,’ ‘place to live,’ and ‘family/clan’; it is etymologically related to the Greek verb demo- ‘build’ (cf. demiurge ‘builder, artificer’). Probably already the Indo-European root *dom-/*dem- had a complex meaning ‘place to live and a group of people linked by social ties or kinship’ (Gamkrelidze & Ivanov, 1984, p. 742).

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Krasnopolska,’ lit. ‘Krasnopolska from home’). The image of DOM as the home is based on the notion that home is a community of people (dom rodzinny, lit. ‘family home,’ domownicy ‘household’) and the place that satisfies one’s needs, provides shelter and safety, secures stability (ognisko domowe ‘hearth,’ lit. ‘home fire’). DOM is then a value as a place where one feels secure, dresses casually (ubiór domowy ‘indoor clothes,’ lit. ‘home clothes’; podomka ‘housecoat’; czuć się jak u siebie w domu ‘feel (like) at home’) and likes to be in (domator ‘stay-at- home’). MATKA ‘mother’ in USJP (2003, vol. 2, p. 789) is merely “a woman who has given birth to a child and is raising the child.” In the cognitive definition of the colloquial understanding of the concept (cf. Bartmiński, 1998, p. 69), the image is richer: associated with the mother is a certain positive, socially agreed- on characterization that embraces, apart from the very fact of birth-giving: breastfeeding (mamka or matka mleczna ‘wet nurse’), care of others (matkować komu ‘to mother someone,’ matka chrzestna ‘godmother’), providing shelter (matecznik ‘lair’), cordiality and tenderness (po matczynemu ‘the mother’s way’), and an important position in the family (cf. the metaphorical extension matka przełożona ‘Mother Superior’ or matka drużyny ‘a team’s leader’). Evaluative elements appear in the sphere of the relationship between the mother and the child: the child’s attitude is tender (cf. the diminutive forms of address: mamcia, mamusia, mamunia, mameńka, mamula, mateczka, matusia, matunia etc.), the mother is loved (cf. jak mamę kocham ‘absolutely true,’ lit. ‘on my mother/like I love my mother’), and respected (the greatest offence is to call someone’s mother a whore, cf. the vulgar kurwa mać ‘fuck,’ lit. ‘the mother’s a whore’). BÓG ‘God,’ according to USJP (2003, vol. 1, p. 309), is “the highest supernatural being, the creator and master of the universe.” However, according to the cognitive definition, which accounts for linguistic facts, God is not only an invisible being more powerful than people but a being that is endowed with many conventional, linguistic-cultural features (cf. Różyło, 2006): he is the creator of people and the world (stworzenie boże ‘God’s creation’), the giver of fate, happiness and wealth (dary boże ‘God’s gifts,’ co Bóg da ‘whatever God gives,’ bogdanka (old use) ‘a beloved woman,’ lit. ‘the one given by God’), the one who takes care of people (Opatrzność Boża ‘God’s Providence’), supports (szczęść Boże!/z Bogiem! ‘God bless you!’), helps in difficult situations (zostawić kogoś Opatrzności Bożej ‘leave someone to God’s Providence’). People are dependent on God’s will (wola boska ‘God’s will,’ niech się dzieje wola Boża/nieba ‘let God’s will be done,’ dopust boży ‘dispensation of Providence; scourge’), God being sovereign in his decisions (miłosierdzie boże ‘God’s mercy’). God is someone who intervenes in a person’s life (palec boży ‘the hand of God,’ lit. ‘God’s finger,’ zrządzenie boskie ‘God’s decree’), punishes (kara boska ‘God’s punishment,’ sąd boży ‘God’s Judgment’) or rewards (nagroda od Boga/w niebie ‘a reward from God/in heaven’) but is always ready to forgive sins (pojednać się z Bogiem ‘make peace with the Lord’). God is

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omniscient (Bóg jeden wie ‘God only knows’) and therefore just (sprawiedliwość boska/boża ‘God’s justice’). He lives mainly in heaven (coś jest pewne jak Bóg na niebie, lit. ‘something is certain as God in heaven’), where he awaits people after they have died (pójść do Boga ‘go to God,’ stanąć przed Bogiem ‘stand before God,’ oddać duszę Bogu ‘give up one’s soul to God’). ANIOŁ ‘angel’ is according to USJP (2003, vol. 1, p. 85) a “supernatural creature mediating between God and people, impersonating perfection and goodness, represented in art as a human being with wings.” The cognitive definition of ANIOŁ in colloquial Polish,8 says that the creature looks like a human being with straight, long, fair hair (włosy anielskie ‘angel’s hair’) and wings (anielskie skrzydła ‘angel’s wings’). Angels are beautiful (piękny jak anioł, lit. ‘beautiful like an angel’), good (anielskie serce ‘angelic heart,’ anioł dobroci ‘goodness incarnate,’ lit. ‘the angel of goodness’), patient (anielska cierpliwość ‘the patience of a saint,’ lit. ‘angelic patience’). An angel personifies innocence (aniołek ‘little angel,’ of a child) and stands in opposition to the devil. Angels are also messengers and bring both good and bad news: anioł pokoju/burzy/śmierci ‘an angel of peace/ storm/death’). Most typically, an angel is considered God’s messenger and therefore a harbinger of the good news (anioł im objawił ‘an angel revealed it to them’; cf. the words of a prayer: Anioł Pański zwiastował Pannie Maryi i poczęła z Ducha Świętego ‘The angel of the Lord declared unto Mary and she conceived by the power of Holy Spirit’). It is still believed, though now less and less commonly, that an angel accompanies a person as a caretaker and companion (anioł stróż ‘guardian angel’). In general, according to popular belief, angels reside in the great beyond, in heaven, where their choirs (chóry anielskie) sing praise to God (śpiewać jak anioł, lit. ‘sing like an angel,’ i.e. beautifully). Their master is God (Anioł Pański ‘the angel of the Lord’) and the queen is the Virgin Mary (Królowa Aniołów ‘the Queen of Angels’). There is a hierarchy among angels: the ones at the top are called archaniołowie ‘archangels.’ An innocent child becomes an angel after death (cf. the frequent inscription on children’s graves: powiększył grono aniołków ‘he was added to the angels’ or the now dated fabrykantka aniołków ‘an angel manufacturer’ for a midwife effecting miscarriages). WOLNOŚĆ ‘freedom’ in USJP (2003, vol. 5, p. 167) is defined as “independence of one country from others,” “the possibility to make one’s own decisions,” “unconfined life,” and “civil rights, delimited by the common good, national interest, and the legal order.” According to the cognitive definition (cf. Abramowicz & Karolak, 1991, p. 53), it is “the idea, the political and social goal, the principle of life for individuals, social groups, classes, and the nation.”

8 Cf. Pitala (2011) and Kaczan (2005).

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For Poles, the basic subject that enjoys freedom is the nation: this is political freedom (wolność Polski/ojczyzny ‘the freedom of Poland/the homeland’). In the notion of freedom thus understood, there is a robust axiological component: freedom is desired, people fight walczą( ), suffer cierpią( ), shed blood (przelewają krew), and die (umierają) for it. Other subjects are social groups and classes (wolność stanów/ludu ‘the freedom of the classes/the people’) or individuals (wolność człowieka/jednostki ‘the freedom of a person/an individual,’ wolność osobista ‘personal freedom’). One can give (dać, darować) freedom or grant freedom to someone (obdarować kogoś wolnością). One can deprive (pozbawić) another of freedom or bestow it (nadawać) on someone; a person may lose (stracić) or regain (odzyskać) it. Freedom is conceptualized metaphorically as a plant: it blossoms (kwitnie), bears fruit (owocuje) and may be one’s staple food (kosztować wolności ‘taste freedom,’ sycić się wolnością ‘be satiated with freedom’). Subjects enjoy freedom to an extent, especially when it comes to public statements in speech and writing (wolność druku/słowa ‘the freedom of the press/ speech’), to demonstrating one’s attitudes and beliefs (wolność sumienia ‘freedom of conscience,’ wolność zrzeszania się/zgromadzeń/dyskusji ‘the right (lit. freedom) to organize/form associations/engage in debates’), to choosing one’s religion and denomination (wolność religijna/religii ‘religious freedom,’ wolność wyznania/ kultu ‘freedom of creed/worship’). RÓWNOŚĆ ‘equality’ is defined in USJP (2003, vol. 4, p. 219) as “non- segmentation of the society with regard to sex, race or social position; equality of rights.” The cognitive definition9 takes note of the fact that in Polish, equality is treated as a postulate, a principle to practice; it is a goal difficult or even impossible to attain. Equality between people and groups of people involves someone who is equal in relation to someone else, hence important notions include equality of people of different sexes, creeds, cultures, generations, different citizens, nations or states. The most deeply entrenched notion is equality before the law (cf. równoprawny, lit. ‘equally-righted,’ having equal rights, or równouprawnienie, lit. ‘equal-rightedness,’ equality of rights) and the need for an equal share of duties. Nowadays the right to equal level of education is also emphasized. The postulate of equality is grounded in the recognition of a person’s dignity, therefore a certain degree of obliteration of the natural differences between people is considered good and socially beneficial. Equality as a principle of interpersonal relationships is taken as a postulate, it calls for promotion and even for active struggle. In colloquial Polish, an ambivalent attitude toward equality can be observed: on the one hand, there is a certain distance towards that notion as a “propagandist

9 For a full reconstruction cf. Bartmiński & Żuk (2009).

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and empty political slogan,” on the other hand, equality is treated as an ideal, a postulate, a desired state. Absolute equality is viewed as utopian and removed from real life (Bartmiński & Żuk, 2009, p. 63).

3. Stereotypes vs. values revisited

The reconstructions summarized above show that stereotypes contain both descriptive and evaluative components, inextricable but manifested at different levels to a different extent. In the stereotypes of the sun, fire, mother, house/home, God, and angel, the descriptive component predominates. In the “ideological stereotypes” of freedom and equality, i.e. at the highest level of axiology, values come to the fore. In Puzynina’s (1992) terminology this is “primarily axiological lexis,” which embraces, apart from wolność ‘freedom’ and równość ‘equality,’ also miłość ‘love,’ solidarność ‘solidarity,’ niepodległość ‘independence,’ prawda ‘truth’ etc. It is not so with portrait stereotypes, such as those of the sun and fire, which carry values: one may say that values “reside in them.” Evaluative elements may be found on their two levels: the elementary level and a higher level. SŁOŃCE ‘the sun’ symbolizes such values as perfection, happiness, freedom, life, or God. This is the high symbolic and “superimposed” level, but already at the basic literal level, the emission of light and warmth is for people an instrumental and vital value, for it ensures safety and creates conditions for living. Similarly, the semantics of OGIEŃ ‘fire’ links it with life, happiness, love and spirituality, but at the bottom of these “high” values there lie existential ones, especially the biological need for warmth. The image of DOM ‘house/ home’ is founded on social values (the family), psychological values (safety, comfort), but also existential ones (shelter). MATKA ‘mother’ in the Polish linguistic worldview is for an average speaker the first person who satisfies the need for closeness, tenderness, love, cordiality, safety. At the elementary level, the mother is someone that satisfies a person’s basic biological needs. BÓG ‘God,’ who for believers is the provider of order and sense at the higher level of the axiological ladder (sacrum tremendum), at the lower level is simply the giver of “health, happiness, and well-being.”10 ANIOŁ ‘angel’ symbolizes innocence, spiritual purity, perfection, beauty, and the good news. Can these stereotypes of the sun, fire, mother, house/home, God, and angel be treated as values (i.e. on a par with freedom and equality) and thus be included in the axiological dictionary? What in fact should be included in the Polish, Slavic, or European dictionary of this kind?

10 Zdrowia, szczęścia, pomyślności: a common Polish wishing formula.

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In 1985, several outstanding Polish humanists were asked what entries should be included in an axiological dictionary of values that have animated Polish social and cultural life over the last two centuries. They pointed to (i) the high values (Puzynina, 1992; Scheler, 1921), the key notions crucial in the political reality of the time, such as freedom, democracy, independence, political bondage/servitude, socialism, (ii) socio-political values, such as nation, homeland, patriotism, internationalism, cosmopolitism, (iii) moral values, such as justice, brotherhood, solidarity (but also betrayal and revenge), (iv) personal virtues, such as dignity, fidelity, courage, valor, (v) emotions, such as love and hatred. On the same list were also truth, lie, violence, evil, as well as person, family, education, knowledge, and wealth (Bartmiński, 1989, pp. 201ff.). Somewhat different results (but also including high values) were obtained in 1986-1987 by the sociologist Maria Mańkowska on the basis of a questionnaire conducted in various social spheres: the first ten in the ranking were love, patriotism, integrity, justice, freedom, honor, friendship, courage, material goods, and moral values. Next on the list were money and work (cf. Bartmiński, 1989, p. 205, fn 15). Over two decades later (in 2009 and 2010), the question of the axiological canon of Poles was again addressed by Jerzy Bartmiński & Monika Grzeszczak (2012), who relied on the 1985-2007 linguistic and sociological research undertaken by the Public Opinion Research Center (CBOS).11 In 2009, the first three positions in the ranking were occupied by freedom, work, and family (then came love, truth, dignity and patriotism, goodness, tolerance, democracy, honor, solidarity, justice, responsibility, person, friendship, integrity, nation, homeland, community, faith, tradition). On the 2010 list (based on twenty studies), the first three positions were taken jointly by thirty-five values, beginning with family values, such as family, work and love, then faith and friendship, freedom, homeland, person, justice, tolerance, democracy, dignity. The next ones on the list were truth, goodness, honor, money, solidarity, integrity, power, health, and responsibility. A comparison of both lists shows that the first ten positions are nearly the same. With the extended range of analyses for the 2010 list, tradition, nation and community drop out of the top twenty and are replaced by money, power and health. The above synthetic view of the Polish canon of values reveals that it embraces both the “high values” (freedom, independence, democracy), found

11 Among others, the following publications were taken into account: Bartmiński (1989), Dyczewski (1993), Świda-Ziemba (1995), Jedliński (2000), Pisarek (2002), Fleischer (2003), Bock & Lühr (2007), Sękowska (2007).

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in the lexicon of the national language (Pisarek’s “flagship words” or Fleischer’s “collective symbols”), and those important for an average person (home, family, love, health, money).12 The juxtapositions we have just seen also reveal that for an average speaker the most important value may be something that does not belong to ideological stereotypes or “high values” (cf. the 2010 list above). One concludes, then, that depending on the political, social, or economic situation, speakers may value different categories of being: these in fact may be very real entities or phenomena that function as carriers of values. In this way, then, the cognitivist hypothesis that values permeate the totality of language rather than being only found in isolatable linguistic facts (cf. Bartmiński, 1989, 2003; Krzeszowski, 1997) receives additional support.

12 Bartmiński (1989) refers to both groups as “value terms.”

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References

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Abramowicz, Maciej, & Karolak, Ireneusz. (1991). Wolność i liberté w językach polskim i francuskim. In Jerzy Bartmiński & Jadwiga Puzynina (Eds.), Język a Kultura, vol. 3, (pp. 51-59). Wrocław: Wiedza o kulturze.

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Bartmiński, Jerzy. (Ed.), (1990). Językowy obraz świata. Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

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Bartmiński, Jerzy. (1998). Podstawy lingwistycznych badań nad stereotypem – na przykładzie stereotypu „matki”. In Janusz Anusiewicz & Jerzy Bartmiński (Eds.), Język a Kultura, vol. 12 (pp. 63-83). Wrocław: Wiedza o kulturze.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (2003). Miejsce wartości w językowym obrazie świata. In Jerzy Bartmiński (Ed.), Język w kręgu wartości. Studia semantyczne (pp. 59-86). Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (2005). Koncepcja językowego obrazu świata w programie slawistycznych badań porównawczych. Studia z Filologii Polskiej i Słowiańskiej, 40, 259-280.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (2009/2012). Aspects of Cognitive Ethnolinguistics. Ed. Jörg Zinken. Sheffield and Oakville, CT: Equinox.

Bartmiński, Jerzy, & Chlebda, Wojciech. (2008). Jak badać językowo-kulturowy obraz świata Słowian i ich sąsiadów? Etnolingwistyka, 20, 11-27.

Bartmiński, Jerzy, & Grzeszczak, Monika. (2012). Zur Nützlichkeit des Kanonbegriffs für die Arbeit am Wörterbuch der west- und osteuropäischen Werte – wie kann man den (nationalen? europäischen) Kanon der Werte rekonstruieren? In Rosemarie Lühr, Natalia Mull, Jörg Oberthür, & Hartmut Rosa (Eds.), Kultureller und sprachlicher Wandel von Wertbegriffen in Europa (pp. 1-22). Frankfur am Main: Peter Lang.

Bartmiński, Jerzy, & Majer-Baranowska, Urszula. (1996). „Dunaj” w polskim folklorze. Etnolingwistyka, 8, 167-184.

Bartmiński, Jerzy, & Niebrzegowska, Stanisława. (1994). Stereotyp słońca w polszczyźnie ludowej. Etnolingwistyka, 6, 95-143.

Bartmiński, Jerzy, & Niebrzegowska, Stanisława. (1996). Słońce. In Słownik stereotypów i symboli ludowych. [SSSL] Ed. Jerzy Bartmiński. Vol. I-1 (pp. 119- 144). Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Bartmiński, Jerzy, & Panasiuk, Jolanta. (1993). Stereotypy językowe. In Jerzy Bartmiński (Ed.), Encyklopedia kultury polskiej XX wieku. Vol. 2. Współczesny język polski (pp. 363-387). Wrocław: Instytut Kultury.

Bartmiński, Jerzy, & Tokarski, Ryszard. (1993). Definicja semantyczna: czego i dla kogo? In Jerzy Bartmiński & Ryszard Tokarski (Eds.), O definicjach i definiowaniu (pp. 47-61). Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

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Bartmiński, Jerzy, & Żuk, Grzegorz. (2009). Pojęcie RÓWNOŚCI i jego profilowanie we współczesnym języku polskim. Etnolingwistyka, 21, 47-67.

Bock, Bettina, & Lühr, Rosemarie. (Eds.). (2007). Normen und Werbegriffe in der Verständigung zwischen Ost- und Westeuropa. Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang.

Dyczewski, Leon. (1993). Kultura polska w procesie przemian. Lublin: Towarzystwo Naukowe KUL.

Fleischer, Michael. (2003). Stabilność polskiej symboliki kolektywnej. In Jerzy Bartmiński (Ed.), Język w kręgu wartości. Studia semantyczne (pp. 107-143). Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Gamkrelidze, Tamaz V., & Ivanov, Viacheslav V. (1984) Indoevropeyskiy yazyk i indoevropeytsy. Rekonstruktsiya i istoriko-tipologicheskiy analiz prayazyka i protokul’tury. 2 Bde. Tbilisi: Izd. Tbil. Universiteta.

Grzegorczykowa, Renata. (2010) Wprowadzenie do semantyki językoznawczej. Warszawa: PWN.

Jedliński, Ryszard. (2000). Językowy obraz świata wartości w wypowiedziach uczniów kończących szkołę podstawową. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Naukowe AP.

Kaczan, Anna. (2005). Obraz anioła i diabła w przysłowiach i frazeologizmach. In Sebastian Wasiuta & Marta Wójcicka (Eds.) Humanista wobec tradycji i współczesności. Prace z etnolingwistyki i logopedii (pp. 71-83). Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Krzeszowski, Tomasz P. (1997). Angels and Devils in Hell. Warsaw: Energeia.

Lippmann, Walter. (1961 [1922]). Public Opinion. New York: The Macmillan Company.

Maćkiewicz, Jolanta. (1990). Wyspa – językowy obraz wycinka rzeczywistości. In Jerzy Bartmiński (Ed.) Językowy obraz świata (pp. 207-221). Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Masłowska, Ewa. (1990). Ludowy stereotyp rzeki – zarys struktury. In Jerzy Bartmiński (Ed.), Językowy obraz świata (pp. 197-205). Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Mazurkiewicz, Małgorzata. (1990a). Dwa spojrzenia na pracę. Perspektywa interpretacyjna a znaczenie słowa. In Jerzy Bartmiński (Ed.), Językowy obraz świata (pp. 129-146). Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

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Mazurkiewicz, Małgorzata. (1990b). Marmur. Dwie wersje artykułu hasłowego do „Słownika ludowych stereotypów językowych”. Etnolingwistyka, 3, 71-75.

Nepop-Ajdaczyć, Lidia. (2007). Polska etnolingwistyka kognitywna. Pomoc dydaktyczna. Kyiv: Centrum wydawniczo-poligraficzne “Uniwersytet Kijowski.”

Niebrzegowska, Stanisława. (1985). Konotacja semantyczna słońca w polszczyźnie ludowej. M.A. thesis. UMCS, Lublin, Poland.

Niebrzegowska, Stanisława. (1990). Gwiazdy w ludowym językowym obrazie świata. In Jerzy Bartmiński (Ed.), Językowy obraz świata (pp. 147-166). Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Niebrzegowska, Stanisława. (1992). „Nów” w polskiej kulturze ludowej i gwarach. Etnolingwistyka, 5, 73-82.

Pisarek, Walery. (2002). Polskie słowa sztandarowe i ich publiczność. Kraków: Universitas.

Pitala, Ewelina. (2011). Językowo-kulturowy obraz ANIOŁA w polszczyźnie potocznej i ludowej. M.A. thesis, UMCS, Lublin, Poland.

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Puzynina, Jadwiga. (1992). Język wartości. Warszawa: PWN.

Różyło, Anna. (2006). O treściach łączonych w polszczyźnie ze słowem Bóg. In Anna Różyło (Ed.), Bóg w językach, tekstach artystycznych i narracjach (pp. 33-50). Sandomierz: Wyższa Szkoła Humanistyczno-Przyrodnicza.

Scheler, Max. (1921). Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materielle Wertethik. Halle: Max Niemeyer Verlag.

Sękowska, Elżbieta. (2007). Polska leksyka polityczno-społeczna na przełomie XX i XXI w wieku. Słownik. Warszawa: Wydział Polonistyki Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego.

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SSSL. (1996-2012). Słownik stereotypów i symboli ludowych. [Dictionary of Folk Stereotypes and Symbols] Ed. Jerzy Bartmiński. Vol. 1 (1-4). Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Szadura, Joanna. (1996). Ogień. In Słownik stereotypów i symboli ludowych. [SSSL] Ed. Jerzy Bartmiński. Vol. 1 (1) (pp. 264-285). Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Świda-Ziemba, Hanna. (1995). Wartości egzystencjalne młodzieży lat dziewięćdziesiątych. Warszawa: Uniwersytet Warszawski.

USJP. (2003). Uniwersalny słownik języka polskiego. Vols. 1-6. Ed. Stanisław Dubisz. Warszawa: PWN.

Vaňková, Irena. (2010). Úvodem: na cestě kognitivní (Etno)lingvistice. Slovo a Slovesnost, 71 (4), 245-249.

Zinken, Jörg. (2009/2012). The Ethnolinguistic School of Lublin and Anglo- American cognitive linguistics. In Jerzy Bartmiński, Aspects of Cognitive Ethnolinguistics (pp. 1-5). Sheffield and Oakville, CT: Equinox.

Żywicka, Beata. (2007). Miejsca i wartości. Zmiany w językowym obrazie przestrzeni we współczesnej polszczyźnie. Lublin: Polihymnia.

Translated by Adam Głaz

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Chapter 11 The linguistic-cultural portrait of Saint Agatha in Polish folk tradition

Agata Bielak UMCS, Lublin, Poland

1. Preliminary remarks

The aim of this chapter is a reconstruction of the linguistic-cultural portrait of Saint Agatha in Polish folk tradition. I accept Jerzy Bartmiński’s understanding of the linguistic worldview as “the interpretation of reality encoded in a given language, which can be captured in the form of judgments about the world. The judgments can be either entrenched in the language, its grammatical forms, lexicon and ‘frozen’ texts (e.g. proverbs) or implied by them” (Bartmiński, 2006, p.12; 2009/2012, p.76). The method of description of the linguistic and cultural worldview is the cognitive definition, used in the Dictionary of Folk Stereotypes and Symbols (SSSL, 1996-2012): it “aims to portray the way in which an entity is viewed by the speakers of a language, to represent socio-culturally established and linguistically entrenched knowledge, its categorisation and valuation” (Bartmiński, 1988, p. 169; 2009/2012, p. 67). The cognitive definition has a “cognitive nature, not purely semantic.” Its basic component is a judgment relating to the mental object being described in the form of a sentence or its textual equivalent. Defining sentences are arranged in semantic categories called facets. A cognitive definition consists of an explication built of facets and the documentation, arranged by the text genre. A very important part is played by so-called “co-linguistic data,” i.e. records of beliefs and practices that, although not strictly speaking linguistics, point to the “socially entrenched, belief-based knowledge of the world, common to the speaker (sender) and the hearer (receiver)” (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 34).1 These practices can accompany the use of language (e.g. in magic spells) but can also occur on their own, as conventionalized, culture-conditioned behavior.2

1 In Bartmiński (2009/2012) these are called ad-linguistic data. 2 For more on the cognitive definition, cf. the chapters by Bartmiński, Niebrzegowska- Bartmińska, and Prorok & Głaz.

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2. Saints in Polish folk culture

For Polish country dwellers, saints are patrons of days, seasons or years, e.g. St. Andrew’s Eve, St. Nicolas’s Day, St. Barbara’s Day, St. John the Baptist’s Night. In proverbs, the actual date can be replaced by the name of the saint, for example: “On St. Isidore’s day [May 10], it’s time for the stork”; “On St. John the Baptist’s day [June 24], it’s full blossom”; “On St. Bartholomew’s day [August 24], there is plenty of fruit”; “On St. Martin’s day [November 11], goose is the best.” Saints are associated with seasons (“On St. Martin’s day winter begins”; “On St. Margaret’s day [June 10] summer begins”), atmospheric phenomena (“On St. Casimir’s day [March 4], the day is wrestling with the night”); “St. Lucia [December 13] extends the day”), farm activity (“It’s already St. John’s the Baptist’s day, let’s go and collect hay”; “It’s St. Giles’s day [September 1], let’s go sowing”), religious periods (“St. Catherine [November 25] begins the Advent, St. Andrew [November 30] confirms it”), social phenomena (“On St. Giles’s day come to me for matchmaking”; ‘On St. Francis’s day [October 4] our brother will get married” – the fall until Advent used to be the traditional wedding period in the country), or weather and harvest forecasts (“The weather on St. John the Baptist’s day will last for thirty days”; “If it rains on St. Michael’s day [September 29], winter will be mild”; ‘If on St. Florian’s day [May 4] the rain is torrential, the harvest will be abundant, good and clean”; “If it rains on St. Jacob’s day [July 25], the wheat harvest will be poor”) (Tomicki, 1981, p. 44). A practical and worldly attitude dominates in folk religiousness and therefore the veneration of the saints has a utilitarian nature (Baranowski, 1970, pp. 96, 112; Czarnowski, 1956, p. 96; Tomicki, 1981, p. 45). Country dwellers seek out saints who will help them in their everyday problems: religion is adapted to the needs of a rural community. For a country dweller only those saints are important who can influence the spheres of reality important from his or her point of view. Most folk holidays, e.g. St. John the Baptist’s day (June 24), St. Vit’s day (June 15), St. Martin’s day (November 11), derive from pre- Christian celebrations, although they were given and have retained Christian interpretations (Stomma, 1981, pp. 45-57). In short, folk religiousness differs from Roman Catholic religiousness. In what follows, I will focus on St. Agatha, a saint important for official Roman Catholic hagiography. St. Agatha was a third-century martyr; she died in Catania in Sicily, probably in the time of the religious persecution during the reign of the Roman emperor Decius. She refused to marry Quintianus, the prefect of Catania, and was punished by being sent to a house of prostitution and a prison. She was then tortured, had her breast cut, and was burnt on live coals. After her death, lava from Mount Etna that may have destroyed Catania passed by the town, and the miraculous event was attributed to St. Agatha’s divine intervention. Because of that she was revered as a patron of Catania and a guardian from fire (Encyklopedia katolicka, 1973, p. 170).

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Folk culture, not only in Poland but also in other European countries, adopted much from the Catholic Church tradition, but it made a peculiar adaptation of it to its own system of values and ideas. In the final part of the chapter, I will compare the image of Saint Agatha in Roman Catholic hagiography with her image in Polish folk tradition.

3. St. Agatha as a saint person

St. Agatha is one of the saints especially revered by members of Polish folk culture, particularly in Silesia (south-central Poland), where diminutive forms of her name are used: Agatka or Jagatka.3 It is commonly believed that St. Agatha protects from fire; cf. the proverbs: “St. Agatha’s bread and salt protect huts from fire”; “Where there is St. Agatha, the hut is safe.” Country dwellers talk about the effectiveness of St. Agatha’s care in the form of first-hand eyewitness accounts. Examples of such accounts were recorded in the Lublin region (eastern Poland) in 1997 from Anastazja Filip (born 1925) from the village of Szczałb, and in Mazovia (central Poland) in 1997 from Wiktoria Głowienka (born 1925) from the village of Kaleń A:

(1) As far as St. Agatha’s picture is concerned, I experienced it myself. St Agatha’s picture is very precious. When there was a fire at our house in Szczałb, it broke out in a moment because it happened in the morning. They asked: Where is St. Agatha’s picture? I took the picture and walked around with it three times. I kissed it and made the sign of the cross obviously and walked around the fire three times. I turned with this picture towards an alder, not buildings. Believe me. After some time everybody saw what was going on. They saw the wind turn in this direction, to this alder. Only then did everybody believe. I left this picture near the alder. After some time I took this picture away and brought it back. (Anastazja Filip, in Adamowski, 1997).

(2) I had my own event. At my parents’ there was a fire. We were brought up in the belief that St. Agatha protects from fires. When I noticed that it was already burning, I ran there. I grabbed St. Agatha’s picture. I was out of breath because there was a fire in my house and I gave this picture to my neighbor, who was a young girl. I told her to run around with it and

3 All references to the sources of examples have been omitted, but can be found in the Dictionary of Folk Stereotypes and Symbols (SSSL 1996-2012).

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put it in the fields. Because when some people put it near another house, everything burnt. People who were looking at what the girl did said that it was a miracle. They saw fire turning away. All things were saved, nothing was burnt. (Wiktoria Głowienka, in Adamowski, 1997)

Anastazja Filip and Wiktoria Głowienka are naive and non-contemplative narrators, representatives of a naive culture. Such individual accounts are especially important for the reconstruction of folk consciousness. Similar accounts can be found in other sources from various regions and times: from Pomerania (northern Poland, along the Baltic Sea), Kujawy (central Poland), Mazovia, and the Lublin region, in sources from the early and late 20th century, as well as the early 21st century. People could be punished for showing disrespect to St. Agatha’s picture. In one account, a woman walked around a burning building with a picture of St. Agatha:

(3) Franek [a man’s name, A.B.] came from the village and shouted: “Woman, where are you trudging with this painting? You won’t help here and your dress will catch fire.” My mother said: “Listen, don’t curse such holy things because you don’t know what may happen to you.” He said: “Yes, a miracle would happen if my buildings caught fire.” All of a sudden I heard: “Fire!” I looked around and people looked around everywhere: where is the fire? And someone said: “Franek, your barn is burning!” (in Adamowski, 1998)

Because St. Agatha was credited with the power to turn away fire, her pictures were very popular with the rural population. In folk iconography, she is presented with salt, a loaf of bread in her hand, and a chalice. On St. Agatha’s day, February 5, salt, bread, and water were blessed: these were considered instrumental in extinguishing fires and protecting houses from them. Relevant accounts come from the Lublin region and from Silesia:

(4) St. Agatha’s salt protects from fire. It is sprinkled around when a fire breaks out. People go in the opposite direction in the fields and immediately wind follows the salt to the fields, where there are no buildings. (in Bartmiński, 1989)

(5) When two houses were burning in Dąbrówka Dolna, one poor woman came to that place and sprinkled St. Agatha’s salt around. As soon as she did, the fire died and the farms didn’t burn. (in Pośpiech, 1987)

(6) When lightning struck a barn, people sprinkled salt around. It was salt blessed on St. Agatha’s day. It was said: “St. Agatha’s salt protects huts from fire.” (in Czyżewski, 1993)

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(7) St. Agatha is a great guardian against fire and all disasters. We built our house ourselves. Once there was a fire at our neighbor’s and it was coming towards us. Other neighbors ran with St. Agatha’s bread and threw it into the fire. The fire turned away immediately. Thanks to it our house didn’t burn. We believe that St. Agatha’s bread helps. (in Pośpiech, 1987)

As reported in these accounts, St. Agatha’s bread would be thrown into fire or carried around the house. A piece of it was put on each corner of the table in the house because people believed that it could extinguish fire, prevent it from spreading, change the direction of the wind, make flames turn away and move to a harmless place, for example to the field or meadow. Similar beliefs concerned St. Agatha’s salt and water. People also turned to St. Agatha in other difficult situations, e.g. storms and floods. St. Agatha’s salt was believed to calm down a storm. Consider the account in (8):

(8) One day during a storm at sea, fishermen from Jastarnia [a seaside fishing village, A.B.] couldn’t pull in to shore. One fisherman’s wife ran out on the shore and sprinkled salt blessed on St. Agatha’s day on the sea. Immediately the waves lost their strength and the fishermen came back safely. (in Stelmachowska, 1933)

During a storm St. Agatha’s water was sprinkled around the house and bread was put into the fire to protect the house from lightning. The so-called “St. Agatha’s bell” was also rung for protection: people would walk around the house three times and ring the bell continuously to drive away evil spirits. In the Sandomierz region (east-central Poland), salt and bread blessed on St. Agatha’s day was kept in a barn as protection against fires and thunderbolts. To drive away storms and hail clouds, people would go to the fields and drop St. Agatha’s salt on the ground or would throw it towards the approaching clouds. When a cloud came or during a storm, St. Agatha’s picture was also displayed for protection. In Kashubia (north-central Poland) and Pomerania, St. Agatha was thought to guard people against floods. According to Kashubian beliefs, St. Agatha’s salt, bread and water also protected against the pressure of the ice that came from the sea onto the land. Similarly, in a Carpathian village in southern Poland, when a stream flooded, salt blessed on St. Agatha’s day was thrown into water. St. Agatha was called upon in the case of diseases because she was revered, together with St. Rosalia, St. Valentine, and St. Roch, as a patron of human health. Because she was tortured by having her breast cut, women suffering from breast diseases would pray to St. Agatha. St. Agatha’s salt, bread, and water was believed to have a therapeutic effect and the power to protect from illnesses: they were used in treatments of people

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and animals, for such ailments as sore throat, toothache, stomachache, goiters, or even pimples. The salt, bread, and water were also given to sick livestock, e.g. to cows suffering from the foot and mouth disease, to cows that were hard to milk, to cows and sheep as protection against the plague or snakebites. In Silesia, St. Agatha’s bread was thought to protect people from being bitten by a rabid dog:

(9) It’s good to take St. Agatha’s bread with you, for example when you go mushrooming or bilberry picking. A snake smells it and escapes from it. (in Pośpiech, 1987)

(10) St. Agatha’s bread protects a person from being bitten by a rabid dog throughout a year. Each person gets a bit of bread blessed on St. Agatha’s day to eat and a sip of holy water to drink. A rabid dog won’t bite such a person. (in Pośpiech, 1987)

St. Agatha’s salt and bread were also thought to protect people from evil spirits and the devil. Blessed salt was used to drive off witches that took milk from the cows. Finally, it was believed that blessing bread on St. Agatha’s day protected from hunger and a morsel of St. Agatha’s bread kept at home provided wealth. People threw a little of St. Agatha’s salt and bread into a newly built or cleaned well to have clean and healthy water. In the same manner, it was thought that St. Agatha’s salt prevented the house from being infested by insects.

4. The day dedicated to St. Agatha

In this rather short section, I will briefly describe the customs practiced on St. Agatha’s day, February 5, as well as the beliefs associated with this day. On this day, oats were blessed and in Zakopane (a mountain town in southern Poland) flour was blessed. Pieces of paper with inscriptions protecting from fire were also blessed and hung in the house. People noticed changes in the weather on this day: it began to get warmer and spring was expected to arrive soon, as expressed in the proverb “On St. Agatha’s day, if the sun looks into the hut through a window, spring looks out on the world.” Laundry could be dried outside, cf. the proverbs: “On St. Agatha’s day clothes will dry”; “On St. Agnes’s day nappies will dry, but on St. Agatha’s day rags will dry”; “After St. Agatha’s day clothes will dry on a fence.” On this day, winter insulation was also removed from houses. Because spring was imminent, one had to be prepared for spring work in the field, cf. the proverb “On St. Agatha’s day take a plow out of the shed.” It was believed that warmer weather and the coming of spring are foreseen by animals, e.g. by young swallows coming out

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of the mud after the winter sleep and by old swallows losing their feathers and turning into frogs. The relevant proverb was: “St. Agatha expels the swallow from the mud.” Because of warmer weather, flies appeared in the house, cf. the proverbs: “After St. Agatha’s day we see flies in the hut”; “When is St. Agatha’s day? When flies fly out from behind the beams.” Mud on St. Agatha’s day was believed to be a forecast of ice on Easter: “If on St. Agatha’s day there is a lot of mud, there will be ice on Easter.”

5. Folk tradition vs. the Catholic Church tradition

The description of St. Agatha as a saintly person is different from the description of the day dedicated to the saint because the function of legends differs from that of calendar proverbs. In the description of St. Agatha’s day, salt, bread, and water blessed on this day play a very important role and have a symbolic meaning. They were believed to protect people from evil spirits and dangerous natural phenomena, e.g. salt drove away dark forces associated with fire (Łeńska- Bąk, 2002, pp. 129-130). The sacredness of bread was believed to increase by being blessed on St. Agatha’s day: in this practice magical elements were joined with religious ones. St. Agatha’s bread preserved the magical protective properties for the whole year (Kowalski, 2007, p. 247). In the linguistic-cultural picture of Saint Agatha, Roman Catholic religiousness and folk religiousness overlap. As an example, consider the following legend from Wiktoria Głowienka from the village of Kaleń A in Mazovia:

(11) St. Agatha came from a well-off family. When Christianity was accepted, she decided to live in piety and preserve her virginity. When the mayor of the town proposed to her, she refused. Then she was sentenced and sent to a brothel, but even there she kept her virginity. She was sentenced to torture, was torn apart and had her breasts cut. Later she was thrown on live coals. A year after her death a volcano erupted. A ball of lava was coming toward the town, but it stopped, went sideways and didn’t damage the town. It was thanks to St. Agatha. (in Adamowski, 1997)

The legend is a prompted text, prepared earlier. It contains elements of knowledge from the written tradition, i.e. from devotional texts assimilated by folk culture. Thus, it has a dual source, oral texts and devotional texts, which overlap and augment each other. The details of the life and death of St. Agatha known in folk religiousness are taken from church religiousness (Fros & Sowa, 2000, p. 75; Niewęgłowski, 2005, p. 31; Zaleski, 1995, p. 78). According to folk religiousness, St. Agatha is the guardian against fire, lightning, flood, all disasters, and the patron saint of women suffering from breast diseases. The latter is also

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true in church religiousness (Fros & Sowa, 2000, p. 76; Niewęgłowski, 2005, p. 31; Zaleski, 1995, p. 79), but she is also the patron saint of breast-feeding women (Niewęgłowski, 2005, p. 31) and bell-founders (Fros & Sowa, 2000, p. 76; Niewęgłowski, 2005, p. 31). In folk religiousness, her attributes are salt, bread, and a chalice, whereas in church religiousness, apart from bread, her attributes are breasts in a bowl, a crown in her hands, martyr’s palm, a torch, a burning candle, and ivory (Niewęgłowski, 2005, p. 31).

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References

Adamowski, Jan. (1997). Legendy i opowieści „Przy źródełku.” Twórczość Ludowa vol. 12 (pp. 25-30). Lublin: Zarząd Główny Stowarzyszenia Twórców Ludowych.

Adamowski, Jan. (1998). Cudowne opowieści przy wielgoleskim źródełku. Twórczość Ludowa vol. 13 (pp. 30-33). Lublin: Zarząd Główny Stowarzyszenia Twórców Ludowych.

Baranowski, Władysław. (1970). Z badań nad ludową recepcją ,,żywotów świętych”. Żywoty świętych z najbliższego otoczenia Chrystusa w folklorze południowej części woj. łódzkiego. Lud. Organ Towarzystwa Ludoznawczego we Lwowie. Vol. 54 (pp. 87-113). Lwów: Towarzystwo Ludoznawcze.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (1988). Definicja kognitywna jako narzędzie opisu konotacji. In Jerzy Bartmiński (Ed.), Konotacja (pp. 169-183). Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (Ed.). (1989). Relacje o kosmosie. Teksty gwarowe z okolic Biłgoraja. Etnolingwistyka, 2, 95-149.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (2006). Językowe podstawy obrazu świata. Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (2012). Aspects of Cognitive Ethnolinguistics. Ed. Jörg Zinken. Sheffield and Oakville, CT: Equinox.

Czarnowski, Stefan. (1956). Kultura religijna wiejskiego ludu polskiego. In Stefan Czarnowski, Dzieła. Vol. 1 (pp. 88-107). Warszawa: PWN.

Czyżewski, Feliks. (1993). Sposoby zażegnywania burzy. Twórczość Ludowa, 8, 34-42.

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Encyklopedia katolicka. (1973). Vol. 1. Ed. Feliks Gryglewicz, Romuald Łukaszyk, & Zygmunt Sułowski. Lublin: Towarzystwo Naukowe Katolickiego Uniwersytetu Lubelskiego.

Fros, Henryk, & Sowa, Franciszek. (2000). Twoje imię. Przewodnik onomastyczno- hagiograficzny. Kraków: Wydawnictwo WAM Księża Jezuici.

Kowalski, Piotr. (2007). Opowieść o chlebie czyli Nasz powszedni. Kraków: Ikon.

Łeńska-Bąk, Katarzyna. (2002). Sól ziemi. Wrocław: Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Ossolineum.

Niewęgłowski, Wiesław. (2005). Leksykon świętych. Warszawa: Rosikon Press.

Pośpiech, Jerzy. (1987). Zwyczaje i obrzędy doroczne na Śląsku. Opole: Instytut Śląski.

SSSL. (1996-2012). Słownik stereotypów i symboli ludowych. Vol. I, nos. 1-4. Ed. Jerzy Bartmiński & Stanisława Niebrzegowska-Bartmińska. Lublin: UMCS.

Stelmachowska, Bożena. (1933). Rok obrzędowy na Pomorzu. Toruń: Kasa im. Mianowskiego; Instytut Popierania Nauki.

Stomma, Ludwik. (1981). Słońce rodzi się 13 grudnia. Warszawa: Ludowa Spółdzielnia Wydawnicza.

Tomicki, Ryszard. (1981). Religijność ludowa. In Maria Biernacka, Maria Frankowska, & Wanda Paprocka (Eds.), Etnografia Polski. Przemiany kultury ludowej. Vol. 2 (pp. 29-70). Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich.

Zaleski, Wincenty. (1995). Święci na każdy dzień. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Salezjańskie.

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Part III THE SYSTEM AND BEYOND

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Chapter 12 Linguistic categories in onomasiological perspective. The category of quantity in contemporary Polish

Marta Nowosad-Bakalarczyk UMCS, Lublin, Poland

1. Linguistic categories and ethnolinguistics

In Polish linguistics, the term linguistic categories is understood broadly and has a number of meanings. In the popular Encyclopedia of General Linguistics (EJO, 1999), a linguistic category is defined as “a set of elements with the same function in the language system” (p. 290). A distinction is made between categories that function in different language subsystems, such as phonological categories (not identified in a separate entry), grammatical,1 lexical,2 syntactic,3 or semantic categories,4 as well as morphological categories5 (word-formational6

1 “A set of mutually exclusive grammatical functions inherent in all segments of a given part of speech and realized by means of specific morphological exponents, e.g. the category of case, gender, number, person, tense, mood, etc.” (EJO, 1999, p. 290). 2 “A class of words with the same semantic features, e.g. the category of animateness (a class of nouns denoting living creatures), color (a class of adjectives expressing the quality of color), masculinity, femininity (in animate nouns), action, state (in verbs, e.g. go vs. sleep)” (EJO, 1999, p. 290-291). 3 “A set of expression with the same syntactic value, i.e. characterized by the same potential syntactic applications” (EJO, 1999, p. 292-297). 4 “The term used in logic in two meanings. In a broad meaning, a semantic category is the same as a syntactic category. In a narrow meaning, it is defined – in extensional logic – in terms of a set of denotata of a given expression” (EJO, 1999, p. 291-292). 5 “A grammatical category identified through functional oppositions, signaled by the set of morphological exponents characteristic of a given morphological category” (EJO, 1999, p. 291). 6 “A unit of classification in the word-formational system, marked by: 1. the grammatical characterization of the world-formational base (e.g. de-nominal, de-verbal structures); 2. the functional relationship between the base lexeme and its derivative (action – the doer of the action; name – diminutive; a property in attributive function (a white house) – a property in predicative function (the house whitens)); 3. a set of word-formational means in structures that are identical from the point of view of both conditions above (e.g. a set of suffixes characteristic of Polish deverbal names of action doers)” (EJO, 1999, p. 292).

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and inflectional7) as a subtype of grammatical categories. An analysis of the EJO entries under the rubric of “linguistic categories” (admittedly, written by various authors, such as Kazimierz Polański, Roman Laskowski, Stanisław Karolak, and Zygmunt Saloni) reveals, to say the least, a certain incoherence in how these categories are understood, identified and defined. For example, the definition of morphological categories makes no reference to the fact that they carry meanings rather than being semantically empty. Word-formational categories fall outside morphological categories thus understood, although new meanings are expressed by word-formational morphemes. Lexical categories, in turn, have been defined as if they had no typical morphological or syntactic exponents. This isolationist method of identifying and defining categories within a single language subsystem, representative of Polish linguistics of the latter half of the twentieth century, does not reflect the nature of language and the way that it operates. Above all, it seems to overlook the fact that language is a human product whose structure and functioning are inextricable from its speakers. As language creator and user, the human speaker does receive due attention in contemporary anthropological and cognitive linguistics, which assumes that categorization (i.e. seeing similarity in diversity) is an aspect of general human cognitive capacity and as such cannot be dissociated from natural language. In the process of cognizing the world, humans create concepts that facilitate an ordering of the reality being experienced. Some of these concepts find their way to language as the basis for divers linguistic categories (Dirven & Verspoor, 2004; Grzegorczykowa & Szymanek, 2001). A major philosophical problem arises at this juncture: do concepts express real-world properties or do they reflect arbitrary linguistic convention? Grzegorczykowa (1996) reconciles the two extreme positions of objectivism and subjectivism by proposing that in the linguistically fragmented objective world, there are phenomena dependent on language to various degrees. The study of language with a view to people’s interaction with reality embraces all three vertices of Ogden and Richards’ (1923) semiotic triangle: reality, its conceptualization and the corresponding linguistic forms (cf. Bartmiński, 2006; Kardela, 1990; cf. Głaz & Prorok, forthcoming, for an elaborated view). Such is the approach proposed in cognitive linguistics, whose cornerstone is the assumption that language is both a creation and a tool of human cognition. Apart from the now classic examples of the cognitive linguistic enterprise (e.g. Lakoff, 1987; Langacker, 1987), its assumptions can also be found in the work of those contemporary linguists who – without calling themselves cognitivists –

7 “A regular opposition between the grammatical forms of a lexeme, found in many lexemes of the same type” (EJO, 1999, p. 290).

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extend their focus beyond language itself and investigate its mental and cultural context. This attitude can be found in anthropological-cultural linguistics (e.g. Wierzbicka, 1988, 1996), and the ethnolinguistics practiced by contributors to the Lublin-based journal Etnolingwistyka. In the first issue of the journal, its editor-in-chief Jerzy Bartmiński wrote:

[the goal of ethnolinguistics] is to reconstruct the folk worldview that underlies language use and that is called upon as an informational substrate, the worldview that constitutes the basis of linguistic and cultural communication. ... [We aim to] directly or indirectly address the questions of how folk communal awareness, in its linguistic and non-linguistic behavior, dissects reality into elements and names them, from what viewpoint and with what degree of granularity the division is made, what relations are established between objects or events, what is the position of the human speaker, how are people’s behaviors modeled depending on their social roles, etc. In short, the question is how language categorizes the world within the cultural frame. (Bartmiński, 1988, p. 16)

In a related account, the author writes that ethnolinguistics

deals with manifestations of culture in language. It investigates linguistic structure in relation to the history and culture of specific communities, especially with the mentality of the group, its behaviours and value systems. It attempts to discover the traces of culture on the very fabric of language, in word meanings, phraseology, word formation, syntax and text structure. It strives to reconstruct the worldview entrenched in language as it is projected by the experiencing and speaking subject, homo loquens... (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 10)

In Bartmiński’s program of cognitive ethnolinguistics, the study of linguistic categories occupies an important position. The assumptions of ethnolinguistics endorse both the linking of all specific category types under the general term of linguistic categories and their hierarchical organization with conceptual or semantic categories at the top. Linguistic categories embrace both grammatical ones (including syntactic and morphological – word-formational and inflectional categories), as well as lexical and phonological categories. As has been said, the highest position in the hierarchy is occupied by conceptual or semantic categories (e.g. actions, processes, states; properties, animate and inanimate entities: person, animal, thing; quantity, size, time, space, etc.). Bartmiński follows Anna Wierzbicka in assuming that these are the most important both

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for understanding language and for its functioning. But one may further ask what concepts are coded in language and how? This onomasiological research perspective, contrasted with the semasiological one,8 allows the linguist to (i) take note of the human subject as the one who – while experiencing and interacting with reality – constructs concepts and expresses them linguistically; and (ii) consistently describe divers linguistic categories that function as exponents of the same content. From this perspective one can notice the isofunctionality of word-formational, inflectional, lexical, and syntactic categories. None of these constitutes an autonomous sphere; indeed, in communication they are used interchangeably and in connection with one another. The adoption of the onomasiological approach yields in effect a holistic (integral) description of language; in particular, it allows one to link phenomena from different language levels, e.g. lexis and grammar (syntax, word-formation, inflection). The theoretical bases of this method of description were laid out by Wierzbicka (1988) in her radically semantic approach to syntax and morphology. According to the author, numerous meanings are coded in languages not only in lexical units but also through grammatical (i.e. syntactic and morphological) means. The claim that all linguistic forms are semanticized or motivated is also a fundamental tenet of Cognitive Grammar (Langacker, 1987, 2008). In the Lublin team, this descriptive method has been applied in studies of space (Adamowski, 1999), sex and gender (Nowosad-Bakalarczyk, 2009), the subject (Majer-Baranowska, 2005) and time (Szadura, 2012). I propose now to look at the category of quantity from the same perspective.

2. Quantity: general remarks

The category of quantity is one of the basic categories imposed on the world by the human mind. It is one of the ten categories recognized by Aristotle (e.g. Aristotle, 1975) as those used to describe the world. Also Kant’s (1952, [1781/1787]) categories of the mind that condition the cognitive interaction with the world include quantity as one of the four primary respects in which one can classify a judgment.

8 Onomasiology comes from Greek onomazó ‘I call/name’, logos ‘knowledge, science.’ The term was introduced to linguistics by Tappolet (1895) with reference to comparative lexicology. Then, under the influence of Zauner (1902), it began to be used with reference to the branch of linguistics concerned with the study of word meanings, similarly to semasiology. The difference between onomasiology and semasiology is the directionality of semantic inquiry: from meaning to form in the former case, the reverse in the latter case. The onomasiological perspective is used by Dokulil (1962) in a description of word- formational categories.

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People measure and count in continual attempts to determine the size, quantity or number of nearly all aspects of the world they experience. All kinds of ontological entities are subjected to these attempts: a) objects: concrete objects (including people, animals, and plants), inanimate objects (both natural ones and artifacts), and abstract objects; b) events (activities, processes, states); c) properties of objects and events; d) space and time, the necessary environment of all being. I assume that the category of quantity is a human (mental and linguistic) means of capturing the quantitative relations identified by humans between the real and the imaginary entities around them. The quantitative characteristics of the world (the relations being identified) are constructed within the frame of specific parameters (mainly spatial but also temporal), attributed to object and phenomena in the (mainly material) world. The parameters result from the cognitive interpretation of reality performed by humans on the basis of their multigenerational and communal psychological, social, and cultural experience. In other words, they result from the human perception, observation, and categorization of the world, the ability to recognize similarities and differences, to abstract away commonalities and arrive at generalizations. Comparisons of these parameters represent a quantitative procedure (cf. Bogusławski, 1973, p. 10; Feleszko, 1980, p. 20). For a quantitative parameter to be applied to an object, that object must have a positive ontological status, i.e. it simply must exist (in the real or a mental world). This, according to Rudzka-Ostyn (2000, p. 208), is in itself a form of quantification that pertains to the parameter of “existence – non-existence.” The author further notes that non-existence is in fact one of the points that limit the scale range from maximum value to zero. Zero values on appropriate scales indicate the non-existence of objects, their temporary absence or non- participation in a given event. An assessment of quantity results from comparisons made at various levels of abstraction. According to Krumova (1989), the exponents of cognitive operations on a lower level of abstraction are elements such as one, many/ much, more, less/fewer and the same (number/amount), used when “the precise quantitative characterization is either redundant or unattainable” (Krumova, 1989, pp. 27-28).9 A high level of abstraction, in turn, is connected with counting and measuring, which allows one to arrive at a number and so characterize the world with precision. This is because the linguistic exponent of this operation

9 Wierzbicka’s (1996) set of semantic primes contains the units ONE and MANY (MUCH) but also TWO. The primes used for direct comparisons contain the element MORE.

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is the numeral: a linguistic category that has emerged “as the highest case of quantitative abstraction,” for it facilitates an expression of quantity totally dissociated from quality (Krumova, 1989, p. 28). Quantitative characterization is linked with how the quantified entities exist and with human communicative needs.10 By saying “how they exist” I mean both objective properties of the world and their subjective perception by language speakers (Grzegorczykowa, 1996). The real or mental mode of existence influences both quantification as such and its linguistic expression. Thekey role is played here by such aspects of quantitative relations as countability/ uncountability (on the basis of divisibility/non-divisibility) and quantitative definiteness/indefiniteness. These dichotomies give shape to the field of the semantic category of quantity and introduce a peculiar hierarchical structure within it. In the center of the category there is a quantitative characterization of countable objects, events, and their spatio-temporally defined properties. The peripheries contain a quantitative characterization of uncountable but measurable objects, phenomena, and properties. Quantitative relations are coded linguistically through a variety of means. At the sentence level, quantitative characterization can be found both in the noun and the verb phrase. I will consider these separately, although – and I say more on this below – (quantitative) conceptual structures/schemata imposed on the conceptual archetypes of things and events that correspond to the two types of phrase are essentially the same.

3. Quantifying things

We count entities that are limited spatially (the usual situation, pertaining to material objects) or temporally (in the case of events or abstract entities), that have a defined shape against their background, and that are discrete or “morphous” (Bogusławki, 1973, p. 8). According to Feleszko, counting consists in

specifying how many times within a given segment of reality one can find objects that have a certain size and that are linked with the same predication (e.g. to say two chairs or three chairs is to state that objects linked to the predication of ‘being a chair’ are located within a given segment of reality two or three times). (Feleszko, 1978, p. 5)

10 Attention to the context of language use, to “who and why verbally and non-verbally interacts with others by using language in communicative acts, how they formulate their thoughts with the help of the linguistic resources available and how they interpret whatever is directed to them” is the foundation of communicativism (Korżyk, 1999, p. 11).

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The distinct natural or artificially delimited shapes of the objects against their background make them capable of being located in a given segment of reality n times. The morphous aspect of entities does not, however, decide their countability, since some morphous objects are categorized as unique: no sets composed of identical elements are possible here. Such is the case with objects referred to by means of proper nouns: London, John Smith, Oxford University. These are juxtaposed with common nouns, which can label sets of elements considered identical (homogeneous), e.g. cities, people, universities.11 The names of countable objects are subjected to numerical quantification, which in the noun phrase is closely connected with referential quantification. Both types pertain to the reference of the information in the sentence (cf. Feleszko, 1987; Karolak, 1989; Roszko, 1993; Topolińska, 1976). As shown by Anna Wierzbicka (1969, p. 99), the Polish quantifiers such as niektórzy ‘some,’ wielu ‘many,’ or dwóch ‘two’ occupy the same position in sentence structure: the indefinite quantifier niektórzy ‘some’ may be substituted with the definite quantifier, i.e. a numeral, as in Niektórzy chłopcy/kilku chłopców/dwaj/dwóch chłopców bawiło się/bawili się na podwórku ‘Some boys/two boys played in the backyard.’ As evidence for a strict correlation between information of quantification and definiteness in Polish and other Slavic languages, consider the opposition between the Genitive and the Accusative cases as direct objects: the partitively unmarked Genitive is also unmarked with regard to definiteness (Daj mi chleba ‘Give me bread-GEN,’ i.e. ‘Give me some bread, any amount of bread that there is’), whereas the Accusative case is non-partitive, “holistic” and marked with regard to definiteness (Daj mi chleb ‘Give me bread-ACC,’ i.e. ‘Give me the bread/all the bread that is here’). The morphological center of exponents in numeral quantification is the grammatical category of number. This category serves to express information about the number of objects named with a given noun, in contemporary Polish the number being one (Wychowuję dziecko ‘I’m raising a child,’ Mam psa ‘I have a dog,’ Oddaj mi książkę ‘Give the book back to me’) or more than one, without the need to specify the number precisely (the elements of the set are homogeneous and the set is infinite). Thus the grammatical category of number in connection with nouns, and more specifically the subcategory of pluralis, expresses the meaning of an indefinite divisible set (Dzieci bawią się w ogrodzie ‘The children are playing in the garden,’ Psy biegają po podwórku ‘The dogs are running around

11 Of course, as extended cases, there may be sets of many Londons (cities called London) or John Smiths (people called John Smith) but the elements of these sets are not “identical”; indeed, they are only grouped thanks to their common name.

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in the backyard,’ Książki oddałam do biblioteki ‘I have returned the books to the library’). Moreover, the elements of the set are viewed as the same: we cannot count objects that we consider heterogeneous, e.g. krzesło ‘chair,’ stół ‘table,’ szafka ‘cabinet’ are not *trzy meble ‘three furnitures’ but just meble ‘furniture’ (without numeral quantification but with a possible partitive quantification, as in zestaw/komplet mebli ‘furniture set’) or umeblowanie ‘furniture.’12 Besides, the set contains an infinite number of elements (can collocate with any numeral) and any number of identical items can be isolated within it. Depending on our communicative needs, we can indicate how numerous the set is or how far it departs from a norm: this can be achieved by means of quantifiers (dużo/wiele ‘many,’ mało ‘few’), nouns with a quantitative meaning (masa ‘mass,’ góra/kupa ‘heaps/piles’), numerals expressing an order (setki ‘hundreds,’ tysiące ‘thousands,’ miliony ‘millions,’ miliardy ‘billions’ (of people)). At the syntactic level, the set’s approximate boundaries can be indicated by means of the following structures: a) the lower limit: ponad ‘over’/co najmniej ‘at least’/nie mniej niż ‘not fewer than’ + numeral + noun (e.g. ponad/co najmniej/nie mniej niż dziesięć książek ‘over/at least/not fewer than ten books’); b) the upper limit: do stu ‘up to a hundred’/najwyżej ‘at the most’/nie więcej niż ‘not more than’/mniej niż ‘fewer than’ (e.g. nie więcej niż/mniej niż sto osób ‘not more than/fewer than a hundred people’); c) a quantitative interval: numeral + numeral + noun (dwie-trzy godziny ‘two to three hours’), od ‘from’ + numeral + do ‘to’ + numeral (od piętnastu do dwudziestu osób ‘from fifteen to twenty people/between fifteen and twenty people’); d) an approximate value: około ‘about/around’ + numeral (około stu osób ‘around a hundred people’); also with the numerals kilka ‘a few’ (3-9), kilkanaście ‘a dozen or so’ (11-19), kilkadziesiąt ‘a few dozen’ (20-90) (Duszkin, 2010).

The size of the divisible set can also be precisely identified thanks to the special lexico-grammatical category of the numeral. As names of universal entities, i.e. numbers, numerals can express, in connection with nouns, a definite divisible set with quantitative specification (pięć książek ‘five books’).

12 The fact that a language has regular numeral forms does not decide the countability of objects. Wierzbicka (1985, p. 288) shows that the use of a numeral with a noun does not mean that the object being denoted is countable and discrete: in I like only three vegetables: spinach, broccoli and celery, the expression three vegetables refers not to three objects but three kinds of “material.” Counting here pertains to kinds, not individual items. In Wierzbicka’s view, vegetables is a “material” noun, not a count noun.

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With countable objects, a partitive quantification is also possible: ćwiartka jabłka, ‘a quarter of an apple,’ fragment wiersza ‘a fragment of a poem,’ odcinek drogi ‘a section of a road.’ Countable objects can also be linked into closed sets: zbiór książek ‘a collection of books,’ kolekcja znaczków ‘a collection of stamps,’ zespół tancerzy ‘a troupe of dancers.’ The sets are in partitive relation with regard to an indefinite divisible set (expressed with a plural form) as a closed subset, which can then be subjected to numerical quantification:dwa zbiory książek ‘two collections of books,’ pięć zespołów tancerzy ‘five troupes of dancers,’ etc. In opposition to concepts sharply delimited in space, there stand concepts that appear as continuous without definite spatial criteria and therefore uncountable, non-amenable to numerical quantification, e.g.woda ‘water,’ piasek ‘sand,’ ryż ‘rice,’ trawa ‘grass,’ mięso ‘meat,’ powietrze ‘air.’ The only possible quantification here is of the partitive type, when a portion of a given substance is delimited, e.g. kropla/szklanka/litr/łyk wody ‘a drop/glass/liter/gulp of water,’ ziarnko/wiadro/tona piasku ‘a grain/bucket/ton of sand,’ ziarnko/woreczek/ kilogram ryżu ‘a grain/bag/kilo of rice,’ kęs/porcja/kilogram mięsa ‘a bite/portion/ kilo of meat,’ haust powietrza ‘a lungful of air,’ etc. The measurement requires that discreteness be imposed on the substance by means of (i) conventional units (metr tkaniny ‘a meter of fabric,’ tona piasku ‘a ton of sand,’ kilogram cukru ‘a kilo of sugar,’ litr wody ‘a liter of water’), (ii) the names of natural forms of existence (główka/ząbek czosnku ‘a clove of garlic,’ kolba kukurydzy ‘a corncob,’ kiść/grono winogrona ‘a bunch of grapes,’ źdźbło trawy ‘a blade of grass’), (iii) the form of production or storage of a given substance (tabliczka czekolady ‘a bar of chocolate,’ kostka masła ‘a slab of butter,’ motek wełny ‘a skein of wool,’ zwój drutu ‘a roll of wire,’ ryza papieru ‘a ream of paper,’ bela materiału ‘a bale of fabric’), (iv) the names of containers used for wrapping or measuring portions of a given substance (butelka/lampka wina ‘a bottle/glass of wine,’ wiadro/szklanka/ łyżka wody ‘a bucket/glass/spoonful of water,’ karton/woreczek mleka ‘a carton/ bag of milk’). Artificially introduced discreteness allows one to arrive at a precise numerical quantification, e.g.dwie szklanki wody ‘two glasses of water.’ Naturally, what is measured is not the amount of the substance but the number of its portions (meat + meat + meat are not *trzy mięsa ‘three meats’ but trzy porcje mięsa ‘three portions of meat’). Bednarek (1994) identifies 107 unconventional units of measurement, which due to their peculiar collocability and semantics he calls “classifiers.” For example, the word kropla ‘drop’ can only occur with liquids, garstka ‘handful’ or szczypta ‘pinch’ only with dry goods, whereas łyżka ‘spoonful’ with either type; rulon ‘roll’ only occurs with materials that can be rolled, motek ‘skein, hank’ only with wełna ‘wool,’ włóczka ‘yarn,’ or nici ‘thread.’ An analysis of these units reveals a criss-crossing of the categories of quantity and quality. Some units (e.g. containers) demonstrate broad collocability, others narrow collocability (e.g. tabliczka (czekolady) ‘bar (of chocolate)’); some indicate the shape of the portion (motek ‘skein,’ rulon ‘roll,’ warkocz ‘plait’), size, number

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or amount (szczypta ‘pinch,’ kapka ‘smidgen,’ okruch ‘crumb,’ ździebełko ‘speck,’ kupa/góra ‘heaps,’ chmara ‘swarm’), or the substance’s nature (kłąb dymu ‘cloud of smoke’ – a volatile or airy substance). The difference between countable (morphous) entities and uncountable ones (substances) is obliterated, for example, in the case of countable objects with a clear shape (whose names have a regular numerical paradigm) but used as substances in the production of other objects. An obvious case are foods used as a “material” for making dishes: vegetables (jem marchewkę, lit. ‘I eat carrot,’ although it is usually more than one; pęczek rzodkiewki ‘a bunch of raddish’), fish (lubię dorsza ‘I like cod,’, ryba po żydowsku ‘fish Jewish style’), fruit, especially small kinds, rarely handled in small numbers (Truskawka jest po 7 złoty za kilogram ‘The strawberry is 7 zloty a kilo’ (in wholesale)). The use of the singular form underscores the material side of the entity and neutralizes its morphous nature. And, as has already been mentioned, the reverse process of delimiting a portion of a substance endows the latter with a specific shape, defined spatially or temporally (cf. Kardela, 1996). Uncountable names, non-amenable to numerical quantification, also include the names of collective sets. A collective set, in contrast to a distributive set, which is unfinished, divisible, and homogeneous, is finished, indivisible and heterogeneous. A qualitative characterization of the set is not tantamount to the individual characterizations of its elements and cannot be derived from their sum. The basic linguistic exponent of collective sets is the category of collective nouns (nomina collectiva), which can be viewed in a narrow or broad perspective (cf. Habrajska, 1995). In the narrow understanding, collective nouns are derived forms, in opposition to both singular and plural forms, which contribute certain semantic elements only found in collective contexts, perceived and identified by humans: they point to the totality of the “object” (dziecko – dzieci – dzieciarnia ‘child – children-PL – children- COLL;13 adwokat – adwokaci – adwokatura ‘lawyer – lawyers – the Bar’) or to spatial concentration, distinctiveness against the background, or internal ordering (ptak – ptaki – ptactwo ‘bird – birds-PL – birds-COLL (birdlife)’; robak – robaki – robactwo ‘bug – bugs – bug-COLL (buglife),’ mebel – meble – umeblowanie ‘a piece of furniture – furniture-PL – furniture-COLL’). In Polish, the meanings are expressed by several suffixes, e.g.stwo - (nauczycielstwo ‘teachers-COLL’), -ina/yna (brzezina ‘birch wood,’ buczyna ‘beech wood’). With these nouns an additional means of expressing the collectivity of the set (multitude captured as unity) is the singular form: the nouns in this group are predominantly singularia tantum. The broad understanding of collective nouns embraces a few subgroups. For example, the meaning of a quantitatively indefinite collective set with an

13 For “collective.”

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approximate number of elements can be expressed with such nouns as stado ‘herd, pride, pack, flock,’ grupa ‘group,’ tabun ‘herd (of horses),’ rój ‘swarm,’ sfora ‘pack (of dogs/wolves),’ oddział ‘unit, squad, troop,’ zespół ‘team,’ characterized by considerable syntactic dependency. They nearly always occur in a noun phrase in which a set is named with a different noun, e.g. grupa studentów ‘a group of students,’ oddział żołnierzy ‘a troop of soldiers,’ sfora psów ‘a pack of dogs’ (Feleszko, 1980, p. 48). The meaning of a quantitatively definite collective set, in turn, is expressed by nouns containing in its meaning a specific number of elements, e.g. para ‘couple,’ trio ‘trio,’ or kwarter ‘quartet.’ In addition, the semantics of a collective set can be found in some singularia tantum, namely those that name objects of different kinds but that are linked by a common function or location, e.g. odzież ‘clothing,’ obuwie ‘footwear,’ żywność ‘food.’ They are not subject to numerical quantification because they embrace divers objects; a partitive quantification is sometimes possible, e.g. część żywności ‘a part of (the) food (we have).’ Finally, the semantics of a collective set is also found in those pluralia tantum that, as Wierzbicka (1985, p. 275) says, are for the same reason located in the same place at the same time, e.g. leftovers, nuts-and-bolts, odds-and-ends. The author notes that the collective-set semantics can be also assumed by some nouns that usually enter into a regular numerical paradigm, e.g. dishes in Mary asked Bill to do the dishes does not denote an open distributive set (dishes of the same kind counted separately) but a closed set of different kinds of dishes that are here and now for the same reason. Similarly, shoes in I got myself new shoes denotes a single pair (the left and the right shoe) designed to be worn on my feet (cf. Wierzbicka, 1985, pp. 283-285).

4. Quantifying events

A quantitative characterization of events includes information on whether a given event is punctual and temporally located, a-temporal, without a fixed value on the time’s arrow, or perhaps iterative or durative over a stretch of time (cf. Grzegorczykowa, 1973). Quantification in the verb phrase thus indicates how many times, over what period of time and/or for how long a predication characterizes a given argument. The expression of the number of events is linked with seeing them as discrete (divisible) or non-discrete (indivisible). In the case of events, discreteness usually has a temporal nature, although spatial discreteness is also occasionally found, as in the case of actions composed of several simultaneous but spatially dispersed individual acts, e.g. napaść Szwedów na Polskę w XVII wieku ‘the Swedish invasion of Poland in the 17th c.’ Countable events are those whose beginning and end are located in time and which are linked with the subject at a point in time (e.g. Raz spóźnił się na wykład ‘He was late for the lecture

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once,’ Pięciokrotnie wyjeżdżał nad morze ‘He went to the seaside five times’). Uncountable events, in turn, are perceived as states characterizing the subject over a long period of time, always, or beyond time (e.g. Zna literaturę francuską ‘She knows French literature,’ Lubi filmy Woody Allena ‘He likes Woody Allen’s films,’ Ziemia kręci się dookoła Słońca ‘The Earth revolves around the sun,’ Dwa plus dwa równa się cztery ‘Two and two make four’). The basic quantitative opposition in discrete events is that between single- actionality and multi-actionality, which basically expresses the individuality or the multiplicity of the action being performed. Most of the time quantification is approximate and numerically indefinite; the need for the exact number of individual actions arises rarely (Krumova, 1989, p. 36). A single-act action is expressed by an individually quantified verb phrase, a multi-act one by a universally or existentially quantified group. Single-actionality and multi-actionality are above all expressed at the morphological level by means of the verb’s aspect (perfective, as in odwiedził matkę ‘he paid his mother a visit,’ pojechał do szkoły rowerem ‘he cycled to school,’ or imperfective, as in odwiedzał matkę ‘he would/used to visit his mother,’ jeździł do szkoły rowerem ‘he would/used to cycle to school’) or the type of the activity. Single-act actions are expressed by “individuating” verbs, e.g. the punctual runąć ‘collapse,’ pisnąć ‘make a squeal,’ whereas multi-act actions are expressed by “multiplying” verbs, e.g. by the iterative pisywać ‘write regularly,’ jadać ‘eat regularly,’ etc. A multi-act action may consist of distinct sequentially performed acts, e.g. zarządzać ‘manage, administer,’ leczyć ‘treat, cure,’ popiskiwać ‘squeal from time to time.’ It may also consist of individual acts performed by many subjects (the so called multi-subject verbs), e.g. Uczniowie pisali sprawdzian ‘The students were writing a quiz,’ or of individual acts performed by one subject on many objects (multi-object verbs), e.g. Lekarz zbadał pacjentów ‘The doctor examined the patients.’ An important role in expressing quantitative information is played by additional lexical means, which at the syntactic level may complement or modify a given quantitative characterization contained in the verb’s meaning. For example, an activity expressed with a “multiple” verb may be marked as individual thanks to the use of lexical exponents of individuality: adverbial expressions such as jeden raz/jednokrotnie czytał tę książkę ‘he read the book once,’ time adverbs such as wczoraj/dzisiaj grał na gitarze ‘he played the guitar yesterday/today,’ nouns that denote a certain period of time such as zimą jedzie w góry ‘in winter he’s going to the mountains,’ prepositional phrases that contain time-denoting nouns such as w poniedziałek idzie do kina ‘on Monday he’s going to the cinema,’ adverbial expressions containing a specific number or a marker of definiteness, denoting points in time, e.g. tego wieczora/ostatniej nocy/10 stycznia/o piątej dzwonił do matki ‘he called his mother that evening/last night/on Jan 10/at five o’clock.’ Also the reverse is true: an activity expressed with an individuating verb may be

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classified as multiple through the use of lexical means (rzadko ‘rarely,’ od czasu do czasu ‘from time to time’), which also make it possible to express deviations from a norm, e.g. Od czasu do czasu przeczytał jakąś książkę ‘He would read a book from time to time.’ Both an indefinite and a definite multiple activity can be expressed by means of quantitative exponents of frequency. In the case of indefinite activities, these are adverbs and adverbials of the type często ‘often,’ codziennie ‘every day,’ przez cały dzień ‘all day long,’ całodobowo ‘round the clock,’ co godzinę ‘every hour,’ cały miesiąc ‘the whole month,’ co miesiąc ‘every month,’ etc., e.g. Co godzinę sprawdzam wiadomości ‘I check my e-mail every hour.’ In the case of definite activities, these are the adverbs of the type dwukrotnie ‘twice,’ trzykrotnie ‘three times,’ pięciokrotnie ‘five times,’ etc. (e.g. dwukrotnie odwiedzał matkę ‘he visited his mother twice’), as well as adverbials containing numerals, e.g. trzy razy ‘three times,’ pięć razy ‘five times’ (przepłynął basen ‘he swam the length of the pool’). Non-discrete events are measured. The measure employed is the duration of the activity defined through a comparison containing the elements mniej ‘less,’ więcej ‘more,’ tyle samo ‘the same, equally long’ (Dzisiaj spałam więcej/mniej/ tyle samo co wczoraj ‘ Today I slept shorter than/longer than/as long as I did yesterday’) and a reference to a norm (e.g. dużo/mało spać ‘get a lot/little sleep’). This kind of comparison facilitates an expression of indefinite quantity. Among the exponents of this operation there are also additional lexical resources (exponents of durative activity) at the syntactic level, e.g. adverbs: dużo ‘much, long,’ mało ‘little, short,’ wystarczająco/niewystarczająco ‘enough/not enough,’ długo ‘long,’ krótko ‘short’; adverbials: całe dnie ‘for days,’ całe noce ‘for many nights,’ cały czas ‘all the time,’ etc. In these cases we are dealing with an indefinite quantity above a norm (dużo ‘much,’ długo ‘(for a) long (time),’ wieki ‘for ages,’ wielokrotnie ‘many times’) or below the norm (mało ‘little,’ krótko ‘(for a) short (time),’ niewystarczająco długo ‘not long enough’). Indefinite quantity, in the case of events, can also be expressed by indicating the lower or the upper limit by means of expressions such as od dawna ‘since long ago,’ od soboty ‘since Saurday,’ od wczoraj ‘since yesterday,’ od tygodnia ‘for a week,’ od niedawna ‘since not long ago’ or do jutra ‘until tomorrow,’ do wieczora ‘until the evening,’ do soboty ‘until Saturday.’ An expression of definite quantity, in turn, requires that discreteness be imposed on the given event and the latter’s part be isolated in time from the whole. Juxtaposition with a unit of time allows for a precise measurement of the event’s duration. Structures of the type numeral + time unit + verb (Śpię pięć godzin ‘I sleep five hours (a day),’ Czekam pięć minut ‘I’ll wait five minutes for you’) are used to express definite indivisible quantity within the verb phrase. As in the case of substances, to arrive at a precise measurement means to introduce numerical quantification into the picture.

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5. Final remarks

A quantitative characterization of the world seems to be based on a peculiar schema imposed by speakers on the linguistic representation of that world. For a quantitative grasp of both things and events, the countable/uncountable opposition seems crucial. Countable things and events are those perceived as having a definite spatial and/or temporal contour. Things and events without such contour are perceived as measurable, i.e. amenable to quantitative characterization, only after a spatial and/or temporal segmentation is imposed on them (a portion for substances, a unit of time for events). Next, quantitative characterization of things and events, both countable and not, may be very precise (numerically expressed, e.g. dwie książki ‘two books,’ czytać dwukrotnie ‘read something twice’ – this is typical mainly of things) or approximate, with the limits of the set being indicated for things (e.g. kilka książek ‘a few books,’ od dwóch do dziewięciu książek ‘from two to nine/between two and nine books,’ co najmniej/co najwyżej/około dziesięciu książek ‘at least/not more than/about ten books’) and temporal limits being indicated for events (e.g. spać do południa/ około ośmiu godzin ‘sleep until noon/for about eight hours’). In the latter case, a deviation from the norm may also be indicated (dużo/mało książek ‘many/few books,’ dużo/mało spać ‘sleep a lot/not too much’). For events, deviations from the norm may also be expressed by means of frequency adverbs, such as rzadko ‘rarely,’ często ‘often.’ For countable things and events, the opposition one/many is important: multiplicity is further internally structured for things but rarely specified for events. The above characterization of the category of quantity, although necessarily schematic, reveals its clear relatedness to other linguistically expressed conceptual categories, mainly definiteness, but also aspect and time (correlated with tense in various ways) for events. The exponents of a quantitative characterization of the world are divers means at various levels of language. To simplify things, these are: morphological means (number, aspect), lexical means (numerals, quantitative nouns, adverbs), syntactic means (structures expressing quantity: quantitative attributes and adverbials of measure). None of these types constitutes an autonomous sphere; on the contrary: they are used interchangeably, they complement or modify one another. How a quantitative characterization of an object or event will be performed in a specific case depends on the speaker’s communicative needs. The same object, e.g. books, can be quantified asbooks , a few books, five books, a pile of books, etc., profiling in each case a somewhat different aspect of that object. It seems that an adequate account of language structure and functioning is best achieved from the onomasiological perspective: in a single descriptive model one can thus capture the totality of the linguistic means used by speakers to code and express their mental quantitative characterization of the world.

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References

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Translated by Adam Głaz

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Chapter 13 The Polish linguistic view of oral and written text

Dorota Piekarczyk UMCS, Lublin, Poland

1. Introductory remarks

The contemporary theory of the linguistic worldview, whose roots can be traced directly to the work of German and American scholars (cf. e.g. Humboldt, 1903-1936; Sapir, 1964; Whorf, 1956), assumes that every natural language encodes a worldview characteristic of the community that speaks it:

Linguistic worldview is a language-entrenched interpretation of reality, which can be expressed in the form of judgements about the world, people, things or events. It is an interpretation, not a reflection; it is a portrait without claims to fidelity, not a photograph of real objects. The interpretation is a result of subjective perception and conceptualisation of reality performed by the speakers of a given language; thus, it is clearly subjective and anthropocentric but also intersubjective (social). It unites people in a given social environment, creates a community of thoughts, feelings and values. It influences (to what extent is a matter for discussion) the perception and understanding of the social situation by a member of the community.

(Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 23)

An inquiry into the linguistic worldview (LWV) aims to describe the linguistic mechanisms and judgments that show how members of a given community think about a certain fragment of reality: how they categorize, organize, model, and evaluate that fragment. The differences between worldviews entrenched in languages derive from different needs of the respective communities. Culture, society, geography, religion: these are but a few of the factors that influence the views of the world contained in different languages. The present chapter is an attempt to treat a limited but significant fragment of the LWV so understood: it investigates the concepts ORAL TEXT and WITTEN

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TEXT, i.e. it studies the portraits or images1 of oral and written text entrenched in the Polish language. As the portraits are rich in detail and cannot be presented in their totality, only selected aspects will be discussed. The choice of these aspects, as well as the choice of the object of investigation, has been influenced by several factors. In the first place, oral and written text are two fundamental forms of human communication; it is thus interesting to investigate how these forms are portrayed through language and what kinds of judgments about them are linguistically encoded. Secondly, oral and written texts, as the most important forms of communication, have frequently been at the center of linguists’ attention as complex, multi- aspectual phenomena, abundant in diverse dependencies.2 Of interest here is a juxtaposition of their scientific and colloquial portrayals, grounded in different types of rationality (cf. Bartmiński, 2009/2012; Kępa-Figura, 2007; Maćkiewicz, 1991, 1999; Piekarczyk, 2006; Tokarski, 1993). It is usually concluded that the LWV is a simplified, naive view of the world. Can we arrive at the same conclusions regardless of which elements of the world are being studied? Thirdly, in contemporary linguistics the processual, interactional, and functional understanding of text predominates, even if the older, formal understanding is still present. The processual approach emerged in the 1970s mainly among American discourse analysts who were interested in oral texts (cf. surveys in van Dijk, 1997; Duszak, 1998; Shiffrin, 1994). Against this background, it is interesting to see whether traces of this kind of thinking can at all be identified in everyday Polish or whether the idea of text as a product (cf. Bartmiński & Niebrzegowska-Bartmińska, 2009; Niebrzegowska-Bartmińska, 2007) is the only one to be found. In other words, it is interesting to see if the notions “product” and “process” are both linguistically entrenched modes of looking at oral and written text. I have adopted the onomasiological approach. ORAL TEXT and WRITTEN TEXT are thus treated not as lexemes but as concepts that can be realized linguistically in manifold ways. My data, however, contain systemic units that refer directly to oral or written texts, but also those that refer to oral or written communication in

1 In this chapter, the terms linguistic view, portrait, and image are treated as synonymous, mainly for stylistic reasons. However, cf. Tabakowska (this volume) for a discussion of the differences between these and other terminological issues. 2 Of the rich literature on the subject, let me mention only a few fundamental (mainly Polish) studies: Abramowicz & Bartmiński (1986), Bartmiński (1989), Bartmiński & Niebrzegowska-Bartmińska (2009), Gilson (2003), Godlewski (2003), Grabias, Mazur, Pisarkowa, & Skubalanka (1978), Lalewicz (1972), Nieckuła (1993), Ong (1982), Ożóg (1993), Tolstaya (1986), Wilkoń (1982). A comprehensive survey and bibliography can be found in Bakuła (2008); cf. also Niebrzegowska-Bartmińska (2007).

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general. An attempt to limit my focus to the former seemed ineffective or even infeasible because, in the first place, it would exclude from analysis the broad and indispensible context and, in the second place, because texts are, in the speakers’ awareness, integrated with more general communicative phenomena and can be isolated form the latter only in an arbitrary manner.

2. The substance of oral and written text

According to linguists, the basic and in fact the only property that necessarily distinguishes oral from written text is their respective substance. The number of linguistic units that testify to the importance of the same property in the LWV is also huge. The acoustic-cum-motor substance of the spoken word figures prominently in the semantics of the basic lexemes of speaking: mówić ‘speak,’ gadać ‘speak, chatter, prattle,’ odezwać się ‘speak, say,’ rozmawiać ‘talk,’ powiedzieć ‘say’; words and collocations expressing loudness, timbre, or manner of speaking: szeptać ‘whisper,’ krzyczeć ‘shout,’ mówić cicho/głośno ‘speak quietly/loudly,’ mówić półgłosem/przez nos/przez zęby/szeptem ‘speak in a hushed voice/through the nose/through the teeth/in whisper’; and in particular the expressions which primarily denote other auditory phenomena: warczeć ‘growl, snarl,’ grzmieć ‘thunder,’ stękać ‘groan,’ ryknąć ‘roar,’ mruczeć ‘purr, growl,’ jęczeć ‘moan,’ skomleć ‘whine,’ etc. The words imply that the reception of oral communication is aural in nature. The addressee’s aural perception is directly reflected in expressions such as czyjeś słowa dźwięczą komuś w uszach ‘somebody’s words ring in one’s ears,’ szeptać/powiedzieć coś do ucha/na ucho ‘whisper/say something into someone’s ear,’ słuchać jednym uchem ‘listen with only half an ear’ (lit. ‘with one ear’). The nature of the substance of written text, in turn, is reflected in such units as pisać ‘write,’ napis ‘inscription,’ opisać ‘describe,’ notować ‘take notes,’ notes ‘notebook,’ drukować ‘print (v),’ druk ‘print (n),’ podpis ‘signature,’ bazgrać ‘scribble’; or in collocations that indicate the manner of writing down a text, the tools used, or the surface on which something is written: pisać kredą/piórem ‘write in chalk/ink,’ pisać na papierze/w zeszycie ‘write on paper/in a notebook,’ pisać na maszynie ‘type’ (lit. ‘write on a typewriter’), przybory do pisania ‘writing utensils,’ nakreślić kilka słów ‘write a few words,’ druk drobny/tłusty ‘small print/ bold type,’ słowo drukowane ‘the printed word.’ The fact of pointing to the graphic subcode of text also assumes a characteristic mode of its reception, implied by such units as składać litery ‘be able to read (albeit poorly)’ (lit. ‘put characters together’), czytelnik ‘reader,’ czytać od deski do deski ‘read from cover to cover,’ zajrzeć do książki ‘have a look into a book,’ przejrzeć notatki ‘go through one’s notes,’ litery skaczą komuś przez oczami ‘one can hardly read’ (lit. ‘letters jump before one’s eyes’).

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The examples show that the features ‘communicated with voice’ and ‘received through hearing’ that pertain to oral text, as well as the features ‘written in symbols’ and ‘received by means of eyesight’ that pertain to written text, are treated in Polish as essential and obligatory. Evidence comes from the but-test: in each of these units, if information about the subcode is negated, a contradictory sentence results: *Mówiła do mnie, ale nie wydała z siebie żadnego dźwięku ‘She spoke to me but did not make a sound’; *Zanotowała mi adres, ale nie napisała żadnej litery ‘She noted down the address for me but did not write a single letter.’ This obvious characteristic of oral text and written text, however, entails a number of specific judgments that shape the linguistic views of both modes of communication.

3. Properties of texts’ substance

The acoustic aspect of oral text and the graphic form of written text are the most conspicuous of their respective features: unsurprisingly, these characteristics are richly documented. However, the units characterizing oral text clearly dominate. In general awareness, there is a strong conviction that the oral message is transmitted through voice, which consists of sounds: wydać głos ‘give voice,’ dojść do głosu ‘take the floor, have one’s say’ (lit. ‘get to the voice’). In communication, therefore, it is not only words that are important but also the following: loudness (podnieść/zniżyć głos ‘raise/lower one’s voice,’ wydzierać się ‘yell,’ krzyczeć ‘shout,’ ryczeć ‘roar,’ szeptać ‘whisper’), pitch and timbre (mówić szorstkim/słodkim głosem ‘speak in a harsh/sweet voice,’ piać ‘speak in a shrill voice,’ szczebiotać ‘twitter,’ buczeć ‘boo’), tempo, rhythm of speaking (mówić jak katarynka ‘chatter,’ pytlować ‘jabber,’ chlapać językiem ‘wag one’s tongue’), the clarity of articulation (mówić wyraźnie ‘speak clearly,’ mamrotać/mruczeć ‘mutter, mumble, murmur,’ mówić przez zęby ‘speak through one’s teeth’). The sheer number of the linguistic phrases that evoke, directly or indirectly, the sound aspect of the utterance testifies to the significance of this characteristic. They are exponents of the judgment relating to the physical side of speaking: physical characteristics carry additional information, often unexpressed directly but built upon the basic sense of an utterance. The general feature of speaking they imply is: ‘an important role in speaking is played by the qualities of voice, the way words are pronounced.’ In many cases, references to the sound aspect of speech contain unambiguous information on whether the speaker consciously produces utterances in a given manner (mówić słodkim głosem ‘speak in a sweet voice,’ mówić zdecydowanym głosem ‘speak decisively,’ grzmieć ‘thunder,’ krzyczeć na kogoś ‘yell at someone’) or reveals something without being aware of the fact (śpiewać cienkim głosem ‘sing small’ (lit. ‘sing in a thin voice’), mówić nie swoim głosem ‘speak in a

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strange voice,’ mówić z (obcym) akcentem ‘speak with a(n) (foreign) accent’). This is an important distinction because subconscious transfer of information only motivates linguistic manifestations of the following types: ‘voice qualities indicate the speaker’s emotions’ (mówił łamiącym się głosem ‘his voice was breaking up,’ wyjąkać coś ‘stammer something out’), ‘they indicate the speaker’s origin’ (zaciągać ‘drawl,’ mówić z akcentem ‘speak with an accent’), ‘they point to the speaker’s inborn traits or personality’ (seplenić ‘lisp,’ mówić piskliwym/niskim głosem ‘speak in a squeaky/low voice’). On the other hand, the connotation that ‘the speaker purposefully capitalizes on the qualities of voice and articulation’ justifies the feature ‘physical qualities of speaking characterize and contribute to the utterance,’ whose manifestations are galore, e.g.: • ‘physical qualities of speech point to the speaker’s emotional state’: szczebiotać ‘twitter,’ gruchać ‘coo,’ mówić przymilnym głosem ‘speak in an ingratiating voice,’ jęczeć ‘moan,’ rzucać pioruny ‘storm,’ wrzeszczeć/ krzyczeć na kogo ‘yell/shout at someone,’ zawodzić ‘wail,’ etc.; • ‘physical qualities of speech point to the speaker’s attitude toward their utterance or the thing to which the utterance relates’: jęczeć ‘moan,’ sarkać na coś ‘grumble at something,’ mówić z (pełnym) przekonaniem ‘speak with (full) conviction,’ powiedzieć coś dobitnie ‘say something emphatically,’ mówić żartobliwym/ironicznym tonem ‘speak in a jocular/ironic tone,’ etc.; • ‘physical qualities of speech point to the speaker’s attitude to the hearer’: krzyczeć na kogo ‘shout at someone,’ warczeć ‘growl, snarl,’ ryknąć ‘roar,’ podnosić głos ‘raise one’s voice,’ drzeć się ‘bawl,’ buczeć ‘boo,’ mówić oziębłym/szorstkim/ciepłym/serdecznym/tonem ‘speak in a cold/brusque/ warm/cordial tone,’ mówić z przekąsem ‘speak sneeringly,’ nawciskać komuś ‘bawl someone out,’ opieprzyć ‘chew someone out,’ ofuknąć ‘scold,’ syczeć ‘hiss,’ wyskoczyć z gębą ‘bawl someone out,’ etc.; • ‘physical qualities of speech indicate that the speaker is unwilling to engage in contact with the hearer’: bąknąć coś/mruczeć/mamrotać/mówić pod nosem ‘mutter/mumble/murmur’ (lit. ‘under one’s nose’), cedzić słowa ‘drag out, pronounce slowly,’ etc. Since involuntary signals are typical of any human behavior, it is the connotations associated with the feature ‘the speaker purposefully capitalizes on the qualities of voice and articulation’ that decides the distinctive image of oral text. When marked expressions are replaced with unmarked, neutral ones, the original sense disappears: Jęknęła, że pracuje dziś do późna ‘She moaned she had to work till late that night’ is different from Powiedziała, że pracuje dziś do późna ‘She said she had to work till late that night.’ Also, some of the terms that primarily denote the qualities of voice have begun to characterize the content of the whole message: Przestań szczebiotać ‘Stop twittering,’ Nie mów do mnie takim tonem ‘Don’t speak to me in this tone.’ Thus, in Polish, the physical qualities of voice are treated as more than a mere additional, external, or complementary

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element of the message: they co-constitute, along with the lexical material, the meaning of that message. In the spirit of Anna Wierzbicka,3 one can say that in the speakers’ view, what is said cannot be distinguished from how it is said. Moreover, in the linguistic worldview a role is played not only by actual words and the way they are pronounced but also by lack of speech, as well as by gesture, facial expressions, etc. Silence, pauses, and body language thus have a semantic function; consider the following expressions: dyskretne/wymowne milczenie ‘discreet/telling silence,’ pominąć/zbyć/skwitować coś milczeniem ‘keep one’s silence over something, ignore it,’ słuchać w milczeniu ‘listen in silence,’ słowa zamarły na czyichś ustach ‘the words died on someone’s lips,’ mówić po dłuższej pauzie ‘speak after a longer pause,’ mówić coś z przymrużeniem oka ‘say something jocularly’ (lit. ‘with one’s eye winked’), mówić z uśmiechem na twarzy ‘smile when saying something,’ przyrzekać/obiecywać z ręką na sercu ‘promise something in good conscience’ (lit. ‘with the hand on one’s heart’), mówić gestykulując ‘speak and gesticulate.’ These judgments also contain one of the most essential differences between the images of spoken and written text. Characteristics of written text are above all motivated by: • letter size: pisać dużymi/małymi/drukowanymi literami ‘write in small/ capital/block letters,’ pisać wersalikami ‘write in capitals,’ pisać drobnym maczkiem ‘write in a tiny hand,’ ściubić wyrazy/stawiać robaczki ‘write in a tiny hand,’ etc.; • letter shape: pismo ręczne/odręczne ‘handwiriting,’ pismo własnoręczne ‘one’s own handwriting,’ pismo zamaszyste/drukowane ‘sprawling/block handwriting,’ stawiać kulfony ‘scribble’; • the legibility, neatness and correctness of writing: czytelne/nieczytelne pismo ‘legible/illegible handwriting,’ kaligrafować ‘calligraph,’ pisać na kolanie ‘scrawl hastily’ (lit. ‘on one’s knee’), bazgrolić ‘scrawl,’ pisać jak kura pazurem ‘scrawl’ (lit. ‘write like a hen with its claw’), pisać ortograficznie/ nieortograficznie ‘spell/misspell one’s words when writing,’ etc. However, none of the expressions above is used to describe the content of the message; it may perhaps (but only in the case of handwriting) be used as a comment on the situation when something was written or signal the writer’s personality. Both these situations have their linguistic exponents: pisać na kolanie ‘scrawl hastily’ (lit. ‘on one’s knee’) and charakter pisma ‘(style of) handwriting,’ poznać kogo po piśmie ‘tell what kind of person one is judging from

3 Wierzbicka obviously refers to natural language itself, not to people’s opinions about it. She writes: “It is true that in natural language, what can be said cannot be fully separated from the way in which it is said, but in natural semantic metalanguage the ‘what’ can be separated from the ‘how’.” (Wierzbicka, 1992, p. 21)

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their handwriting.’ Thus, the role of the features implied by these expressions is comparable to the following feature of ORAL TEXT: ‘the speaker reveals something to the hearer without being aware of the fact.’ It appears that the different status of the physical qualities of speech and writing also has another basis. The qualities of speech are perceived as natural in the sense that they are not guided by any formalized principles, whereas the qualities of writing (except when they signal the situation or the personality of the writer) do follow such principles, cf. pisownia/zasady pisowni ‘rules of orthography,’ zasady interpunkcji ‘rules of punctuation,’ zasady użycia małej i wielkiej litery ‘rules of capitalization,’ etc. The qualities of writing, then, are not perceived by average speakers of Polish as constitutive of the message content: they can merely modify the meaning expressed by the message’s verbal component. This image of written text also explains why in Polish the literal meaning of written messages is a conventionalized feature, why the intentions and expectations of the sender are thought to be expressed directly, cf. litera prawa ‘letter of law,’ powoływać się na literę czegoś ‘cite the letter of something, such as regulations,’ or literalny ‘literal,’ from litera ‘letter, character.’4 Another trace of the conviction that typographical properties of writing do not play the same role as physical properties of speaking is the expression czytać coś między wierszami ‘read between the lines.’ Finally, some of the uses of the word tekst ‘text’ suggest that it is understood as the content of the message but not as the way it is written, eg. tekst depeszy/piosenki/ustawy ‘text of a telegram/song/legal act.’

4. Spoken and written texts: events or products?

A very deep, linguistically rooted conviction is that a written text, being an inscription on some surface, is ready, finished, and given as total. Therefore, it can be subjected to various kinds of reading and action. Consider the following expressions, a mere sample of what can be found: czytać tekst od deski do deski ‘read a text from cover to cover,’ oddać tekst do druku ‘submit a text to print,’ schować tekst do szuflady ‘write for one’s own pleasure’ (lit. ‘put a text to the drawer’), dać komuś zaproszenie ‘hand someone an invitation,’ wysłać list ‘post a letter,’ odebrać pismo ‘receive a formal letter,’ przechowywać listy ‘store/ keep letters,’ wypożyczyć książkę ‘borrow a book,’ rozlepić ogłoszenia ‘put up advertisements,’ oprawić pracę ‘have one’s thesis bound,’ etc. Subjected to actions like those, a written text reaches the receiver and thus begins to really

4 From Latin littera ‘alphabetic character,’ litterālis ‘concerning letters.’

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function as written text. Its nature is also preserved in other actions, such as copying (skserować ‘photocopy,’ przepisać ‘rewrite’) or writing over it (nanosić uwagi/komentarze na marginesie ‘introduce notes/comments on the margin,’ podkreślić fragment tekstu ‘underline a fragment’). Some actions, however, do destroy the text as an object: spalić rękopis ‘burn the manuscript,’ wyrzucić list ‘throw the letter away,’ or skasować plik ‘delete a file’ denote actions that bring an end to a written text. Thus, written text is understood here as a product, a physical object, a result of the action of writing; it exists independently of either its producer or receiver. The spoken word receives a very different portrayal. If it is transmitted through voice, which is inseparable from the action of speaking, then speaking cannot be dissociated from what is said. A message is never given in its totality but it is an event, a process, which takes place between the speaker and hearer. An orally transmitted message has all the properties of speech as behavior: it starts when the speaker begins talking, it breaks when the speaker stops (otworzyć usta ‘open one’s mouth (to speak),’ dojść do głosu ‘take the floor,’dukać ‘stammer,’ tracić głos ‘lose one’s voice’), and changes in the manner of speaking entail changes in the text (e.g. zniżyć ton ‘lower one’s voice,’ wpaść w jakiś ton ‘adopt a certain tone’). For language users, speaking is tantamount to sending a message, while hearing equals reception, therefore the order of reception is constituted by the order of speaking. For example, consider the collocability of słuchać ‘listen’ and przerywać ‘interrupt’ or ‘stop’: they occur with words denoting the speaker and the utterance (słuchać kogoś/tego, co ktoś mówi ‘listen to someone/to what someone says,’ przerwać komuś/czyjąś wypowiedź ‘interrupt someone/someone’s speech’), whereas czytać ‘read’ and przerwać czytanie ‘stop reading’ only occur with terms denoting texts. This means that oral text in everyday understanding does not exist outside the situation of speaking, does not function independently but only as being simultaneously uttered and heard. Therefore, actions other than speaking and listening “destroy” oral text: when something is reported by a third person, it is not the same text that is reported (cf. *Powiedziałem jej o spotkaniu za pośrednictwem kolegi (I told her about the meeting through a friend)). When oral text is written down, what changes is not a mere substance of the message but its mode of existence: it becomes a full-fledged, “real” text (cf. Możesz mi to dać na piśmie? (Can you give it to me in writing?)). It is precisely due to the idea of oral text being different in its very nature from written text that speakers of Polish are so reluctant to refer to the former as tekst. In its basic meaning, tekst denotes a body of typographically fixed words that constitute a whole (cf. przeczytać/przepisać/skserować tekst ‘read/rewrite/ photocopy a text’). The word tekst in reference to oral communication is only used in a few contexts, e.g. wyskoczyć do kogoś z jakimś tekstem ‘come up with some silly words’ (lit. ‘with such and such text’), mówić otwartym tekstem ‘say openly’ (lit. ‘in an open text’).

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These judgments, however, do not concern all spoken and written texts, for there exist written texts that are perceived as designed for oral delivery, and oral texts that can be reproduced without compromising their essence. The former are signaled by the lexemes wygłosić ‘deliver,’ odczytać ‘read out,’ deklamować ‘declaim,’ recytować ‘recite,’ which contain the component ‘say something that has been written down.’ To the latter category belong above all texts perceived as anonymously produced for the common good, created for general and frequent reproduction – these are introduced by the verbs opowiadać (dowcip/ bajkę) ‘tell (a joke/story)’ and odmawiać (modlitwę) ‘say (a prayer).’ The second group also contains texts produced orally but with the intention of writing them down (dyktować ‘dictate’) as well as those that must be preserved for a certain reason (protokołować ‘take minutes,’ stenografować ‘take down in shorthand’). Thus, in Polish, various judgments on the spoken and written word have been encoded. Both of these conceptual categories are internally heterogeneous. Their central features are ‘is an event’ (ORAL TEXT) and ‘is a product’ (WRITTEN TEXT), so that the central positions in the categories are occupied by texts that are, respectively, primarily spoken and primarily written. The peripheries of the categories, in turn, contain texts that are secondarily spoken (prepared for formal delivery and/or read out) and secondarily written (dictated and written down).5 Additional arguments supporting the portrait thus delineated come from an analysis of the linguistic portrayal of the sender-receiver relationship in both kinds of text. Speaker judgments in this area deserve a more comprehensive treatment in a wider perspective, to which I now turn.

5. The communicating parties

The way in which language portrays the sender-receiver relationship in communication is apparently straightforward. Linguistic communication occurs when one person communicates something verbally to another: “[O]ne of the most firmly entrenched properties of text is that there is a subject behind it, a creator, author, sender; [also,] it is usually directed towards someone, a receiver, i.e. a reader or listener” (Niebrzegowska-Bartmińska, 2007, pp. 25-26, emphasis in the original; cf. also Bartmiński & Niebrzegowska-Bartmińska, 2009, p. 26). However, a closer look at linguistic phenomena, with their regularities but also irregularities, reveals that the relationship is portrayed as much more complex.

5 I am obviously invoking here the prototype model of categorization (e.g. Rosch 1975, 1978; cf. Taylor, 2003). The classical model does not recognize an internal diversification of category membership.

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A characteristic feature of Polish is that it lacks terms denoting participants of a communicative situation as such; instead, the Polish lexicon contains names of specific communicative roles. Participants in oral communication are referred to as: referent/prelegent/mówca ‘speaker,’ przedmówca ‘preceding/ previous speaker,’ słuchacz ‘listener,’ audytorium ‘audience,’ also rozmówca ‘interloculor,’ dysputant ‘debater,’ dyskutant ‘discussant,’ adwersarz ‘adversary,’ oponent ‘opponent.’ They all, however, pertain to public communicative situations. The sender of oral text cannot be called its autor ‘author,’ twórca ‘creator,’ or nadawca ‘sender.’ Although the words autor and twórca (though not nadawca, cf. below) may collocate with names of oral texts (autor kazania ‘the author of a sermon,’ twórca przemówienia ‘the author [lit. creator] of a speech’), they refer to the person who has constructed the given text, not the actual speaker. Such is the portrayal one finds in the common awareness of the speaker of colloquial Polish. It might seem that the portrayal of the sender and receiver of written text is simpler. However, the simplicity is misleading, for one need only realize that the words autor ‘author,’ nadawca ‘sender,’ twórca ‘author/creator,’ czytelnik ‘reader,’ adresat ‘addressee,’ odbiorca ‘receiver’ collocate anyway but freely with terms for kinds of written text. The strictest limitations are imposed on such items as nadawca, adresat, and odbiorca, as they only collocate with words like list ‘letter,’ pismo ‘official letter,’ depesza ‘telegram,’ or mail ‘e-mail’: the limitations result from the component of their meaning ‘communicate something through e-mail or the Internet.’6 The widest range of collocations, on the other hand, can be established for the lexeme autor, which co-occurs with the names of all kinds of literary texts (autor wiersza/ballady/powieści ‘the author of a poem/ballad/ novel’) as well as scientific ones (autor monografii/podręcznika/artykułu ‘the author of a monograph/textbook/article’). With other kinds of text, the matter is more enigmatic. Autor can co-occur with such words as dziennik ‘memoir,’ list ‘letter,’ or kazanie ‘sermon’ but protokół ‘minutes,’ życiorys ‘biography,’ or wizytówka ‘business card’ are not normally included among its collocations. The reasons for the peculiar status quo can be sought in the polysemy of autor. In its basic meaning, autor is above all ‘the creator of a literary or scientific work’ – the meaning more clearly invokes a social rather than a communicative role, cf. spotkanie z autorem ‘meeting with an author,’ wieczór autorski ‘author’s soiree.’ The second meaning, derived from the first, definitely activates a communicative role (autor listu/komentarza ‘the author of a letter/commentary’) but because associations with the creative process are still strong, collocations with names

6 I omit here, naturally, the senses and collocability of those items as technical terms in scholarly discourse.

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of non-creative texts are blocked. A similar explanation can be found for the collocability of twórca ‘creator.’ Its very strong semantic component of ‘creation, producing texts of artistic value’ makes it a poor candidate to collocate with such words as życiorys ‘biography’ or even list ‘letter.’ In common awareness, the receiver of texts produced by autor and twórca is czytelnik, which does not denote any person who happens to be reading something but one that above all reads books and/or magazines. Thus, Polish contains terms that allow us to name both sides of the communicative act and at the same time clearly differentiates between the communicative roles depending on the kind of text. The names of these roles relate to specific kinds of public behavior, e.g. speeches, correspondence, literary communication, but none has a broad application. However, the existence of the lacunae does not mean that Polish lacks a more general model of the sender- receiver relationship (a lack of a lexical exponent is not tantamount to a lack of linguistic manifestation). Indeed, the model implies the existence of a “deeper” layer of language: the predicate-argument structures of verbs. All Polish verbs that contain the component ‘communicate orally’ are exponents of a three-argument predicate (cf. Greń, 1994; Kozarzewska, 1990; Marcjanik, 1980; Pajdzińska, 1983). The predicate induces two noun phrase (NP) arguments and one sentential argument.7 The NP arguments are represented by names that point to the communicating parties: the first argument, the person who utters a text, plays the role of the sender; the second argument, the person who perceives the text aurally, plays the role of the addressee. A third complement is a sentential argument that is expressed by means of direct speech, indirect speech, nominalization, or the name of the kind of text. In textual usage, the predicate- argument structure may assume the shape shown in Figure 13-1.

mówi OR says/tells

krzyczy Y-owi/do Y-ka że... /żeby... X shouts Y-DAT/to Y-GEN that... /to...

szepcze o (o tym, że...) whispers loc

Fig. 13.1 Semantic structure of Polish verbs of oral communication. DAT – dative case; GEN – genitive case; OR – oratio; loc – locativus

7 NP arguments denote persons or objects, sentential arguments denote events or situations. Therefore, sentential arguments can also be called event arguments.

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A somewhat different structure is associated with discourse-naming predicates but also those require complementation through NP arguments (Fig. 13.2).

rozmawia talks o loc (o tym, że...) dyskutuje z Y-kiem na temat... X o (about the fact that...) discusses with Y-INS loc o the subject of... spiera się argues

Fig. 13.2 Semantic structure of Polish discourse-naming predicates. INS – instrumental case

The two structures show that Polish overtly and conspicuously codes the relationship between the communicating parties as an important aspect of the image of text. The predicate with its arguments constitutes a syntactic and semantic whole, and the verba dicendi structures show that that whole is a communicative situation with three elements on which it relies for its existence: the sender, the text, and the receiver. Moreover, the structures indicate that two different portraits of the speaker-hearer relationship exist in Polish. In one of them, evoked by “monologic” verbs, an active role is attributed only to the speaker, whereas the hearer is passive and subordinated. In the other portrayal, evoked by discursive verbs, communication is viewed as an activity in which both sides are engaged to the same extent: they switch the roles of speaker and hearer and thus maintain an equal-rank relationship. Much more complex and difficult to grasp is the relationship between written text and its sender plus receiver. This is mainly due to the polysemy of the verbs of writing, especially pisać ‘write.’ In their basic meaning, i.e. when they denote the action of writing graphic symbols, the verbs only require one personal complementation, as well as an indication of the product of the action, the instrument, and the writing surface (Fig. 13.3). na czym on what czym pisze with what w czym X in what is writing w/na czym in/on what po czym over what

Fig. 13.3 Semantic structure of pisać ‘write’

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The second personal argument is not implied by the predicate at all. If one considers that the argument of the action’s product may be realized as the name of the actual text (X pisze dyktando ‘X is writing a dictation’) but also as the name of meaningless entities (X pisze litery ‘X is writing characters’), it appears that the product of writing is not conceived of as the message. By the same token, the first argument (X) is not identified with the sender.

A different structure is associated with the verbs of text production (pisać2 ‘write,’ tworzyć ‘create, compose’) (Fig. 13.4).

dla... for... pisze2 do... X P is writing to/for... na... for...

Fig. 13.4 Semantic structure of pisać2 ‘write.’ P – product

The verbs open three argument positions. Because these verbs denote an action whose end product is a communicative text and because the second argument (P) is realized only by the name of that product (the name of the text or its part), the first personal argument is identified with the sender of the message. However, the third argument need not be the receiver, for its manifestations may be such expressions as do druku ‘for publication,’ do gazety ‘for/to a newspaper,’ na konferencję ‘for a conference.’ Indirectly, these expressions relate to a certain characterization of the addressee (do gazety – for the readers of the newspaper) but above all point to the goals of the agent. Therefore, an important element in their semantics is the component ‘create a text with the aim of its public distribution.’ Against this backdrop, it is easier to see why the exponent of the receiver (if realized overtly) always denotes a rather vague body of people

(pisać2 dla dzieci/dla odbiorcy masowego ‘write for children/for the mass reader’). The properties of these verbs can be captured thus: of the whole sender–text– receiver relation they only express its part. They do denote the sender–text relation but the reception and the actual receiver they only “envisage” – they suggest that it may obtain once the text is publicly available. Let us also note that the predicate not only fails to imply the sentential argument, so characteristic of verba dicendi, but in fact rules it out (cf. *Pisał do druku, że badania amerykańskich uczonych potwierdziły jego tezy ‘He wrote for publication that the research of American scholars corroborated his hypotheses’). This restriction appears to be rather important: the fact that the verbs of writing only imply the product and

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not the process that leads to the product shows that written text is conceived of as a product. It also shows that for language users the creation of written text does not mean that the sender informs the receiver about anything. Writing, in contrast to speaking, is not perceived as part of the communicative act. Similar requirements, but only in the formal sense, exist for the predicate

that denotes preserving something in writing, whose exponents are e.g. pisać3 ‘write,’ zapisać ‘write down,’ notować ‘take notes,’ protokołować ‘take minutes.’ Sentences with these verbs, however, inform about the existence of special kinds of texts: those that are created not in order to communicate something but in order to preserve what has been communicated orally or at least what has been thought. The verbs point to texts that have arisen as a result of speech (or of thought) being transferred into the written form. Due to their “dual nature” it is impossible to establish a kind of relationship between the sender, the text, and the receiver: the sender and receiver of oral text need not coincide with the sender and receiver of written text. If with some texts one can point to their receiver as a concrete person for whom it has been uttered or written down (Zanotuj sobie, co masz kupić ‘Take down what you need to buy’; Pielęgniarka zapisała pacjentowi adres przychodni ‘The nurse wrote down the address of the health center for the patient’), in the case of other verbs this is impossible, e.g. the verbs protokołować ‘take minutes’ or stenografować ‘take down in shorthand’ block the receiver argument. In the case of a text written down, one can only talk about the sender when the first argument denotes both the speaker and the person who does the actual writing. A semantic structure that approximates that of verba dicendi can only be

identified with the verb pisać4 ‘write,’ which means ‘inform/communicate about something’ (Fig. 13.5).

że.../żeby... that.../in order to... pisze4 Y-owi/do Y-ka X OR W loc is writing Y-DAT/to Y-GEN na o + loc on/over

Fig. 13.5 Semantic structure of pisać4 ‘write’

The left-hand-side argument denotes the text’s sender, the second personal argument denotes its receiver, and the non-personal arguments denote the text itself and the medium of the message (or the text’s location). Text is understood here as a message (the most typical argument is an event, although it can also

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be a product, e.g. list ‘letter’). The receiver is usually a specific person to whom the message is directed. However, the verb’s semantics contains the component ‘there is no direct contact between the person who writes and the one who reads’ (cf. Mówię ci, mieliśmy z tego niezły ubaw ‘I’m telling you, we had a good laugh,’ vs. *Piszę ci, mieliśmy z tego niezły ubaw ‘I’m writing you, we had a good laugh’), also indicated by the locative argument (e.g. w liście/gazecie/książce ‘in

later/paper/book’). Thus, the structure of pisać4 captures the communicative situation ex post, as something completed.

6. Recapitulation

The analysis presented here concerns relatively small portions of the portraits of oral and written text in Polish, but even so it reveals several regularities. First, it shows that the language is a repository for rather distinct portraits of both categories of text as well as of various situations in which they occur. The diversity means that both concepts have a prototypical structure. Second, language-entrenched observations are often strikingly accurate and profound. Usually, they converge with ideas on the spoken and written word proposed in linguistics. Third, the view of text as an event, which appeared in linguistics as late as in the 1970s, is not merely signalled but constitutes the very essence of how oral and written text is portrayed in Polish. Written text, too, although generally perceived as a material product, acquires certain features of a process if seen in the context of the act of communication. The analysis hopefully shows that the methodology of Lublin ethnolinguistics facilitates a verbalization of human experience entrenched in language. It also shows how and to what extent the Polish language “imposes” a certain way of thinking about reality on its speakers. The reconstructed images are not universal: they are characteristic of Polish only. However, the ethnolinguistic methodology allows one to investigate images, portraits, or views encoded in any language and thus to compare them, to reveal what they share and what is peculiar to each.

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References

Abramowicz, Maciej, & Bartmiński, Jerzy. (Eds.). (1986). Tekst ustny – oral text. Struktura i pragmatyka – problemy systematyki – ustność w literaturze. Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Bakuła, Kordian. (2008). Mówione – pisane: komunikacja, język, tekst. Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (1989). Opozycja ustności i literackości a współczesny folklor. Literatura Ludowa, 1, 3-12.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (2009/2012). Aspects of Cognitive Ethnolinguistics. Ed. Jörg Zinken. Sheffield and Oakville, CT: Equinox.

Bartmiński, Jerzy, & Niebrzegowska-Bartmińska, Stanisława. (2009). Tekstologia. Warszawa: PWN.

Duszak, Anna. (1998). Tekst, dyskurs, komunikacja międzykulturowa. Warszawa: PWN.

Gilson, Étienne. (2003). Słowo mówione i słowo pisane. In Grzegorz Godlewski (Ed.), Antropologia słowa. Zagadnienia i wybór tekstów (pp. 416-422). Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego.

Godlewski, Grzegorz. (Ed.). (2003). Antropologia słowa. Zagadnienia i wybór tekstów. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego.

Grabias, Stanisław, Mazur, Jan, Pisarkowa, Krystyna, & Skubalanka, Teresa. (Eds.). (1978). Studia nad składnią polszczyzny mówionej. Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich.

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Greń, Zbigniew. (1994). Semantyka i składnia czasowników oznaczających akty mowy w języku polskim i czeskim. Warszawa: Slawistyczny Ośrodek Wydawniczy.

Humboldt, Wilhelm von. (1903-1936). Gesammelte Schriften: Ausgabe Der Preussischen Akademie Der Wissenschaften. Bd. I-XVII. Berlin: Albert Leitzmann.

Kępa-Figura, Danuta. (2007). Kategoryzacja w komunikacji językowej: na przykładzie leksemu „ptak”. Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Kozarzewska, Emilia. (1990). Czasowniki mówienia we współczesnym języku polskim. Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego.

Lalewicz, Janusz. (1975). Komunikacja językowa i literatura. Wrocław: Ossolineum.

Maćkiewicz, Jolanta. (1991). Nienaukowy i naukowy obraz morza na przykładzie języka polskiego i angielskiego. Gdańsk: Uniwersytet Gdański.

Maćkiewicz, Jolanta. (1999). Słowo o słowie. Potoczna wiedza o języku. Gdańsk: Uniwersytet Gdański.

Marcjanik, Małgorzata. (1980). Czasowniki modalno-kauzatywne we współczesnej polszczyźnie: analiza łączliwości czasowników oznaczających rozkaz, prośbę, namowę, zakaz, pozwolenie. Zielona Góra: Wyższa Szkoła Pedagogiczna.

Nieckuła, Franciszek. (1993). Język ustny a pisany. In Jerzy Bartmiński (Ed.), Encyklopedia kultury polskiej XX wieku. T.2. Współczesny język polski (pp. 101- 114). Wrocław: Wiedza o kulturze.

Niebrzegowska-Bartmińska, Stanisława. (2007). Wzorce tekstów ustnych w perspektywie etnolingwistycznej. Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Ong, Walter. (1972). Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen.

Ożóg, Kazimierz. (1993). Język mówiony. In Jerzy Bartmiński (Ed.), Encyklopedia kultury polskiej XX wieku. T.2. Współczesny język polski (pp. 87-100). Wrocław: Wiedza o kulturze.

Pajdzińska, Anna. (1983). Semantyka i składnia związków frazeologicznych nazywających akt mówienia. Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

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Piekarczyk, Dorota. (2006). Linguistic categorization of flowers and its parallels in science: Evidence from Polish. Slavica Gandensia, 33 (1), 171-183.

Rosch, Eleanor H. (1975). Cognitive reference points. Cognitive Psychology, 7 (4), 532-547.

Rosch, Eleanor H. (1978). Principles of categorization. In Eleanor H. Rosch & Barbara B. Lloyd (Eds.), Cognition and Categorization (pp. 27-48). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Sapir, Edward. (1964). Culture, Language, and Personality: Selected Essays. Ed. David G. Mandelbaum. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Shiffrin, Deborah. (1994). Approaches to Discourse. Cambridge: Blackwell.

Tokarski, Ryszard. (1993). Słownictwo jako interpretacja świata. In Jerzy Bartmiński (Ed.), Encyklopedia kultury polskiej XX wieku. T.2. Współczesny język polski (pp. 335-362). Wrocław: Wiedza o kulturze.

Tolstaya, Svetlana M. (1986). Ustnyy tekst v yazyke i kul’ture. In Maciej Abramowicz & Jerzy Bartmiński (Eds.), Tekst ustny – oral text. Struktura i pragmatyka – problemy systematyki – ustność w literaturze (pp. 9-14). Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS. [published in Polish as 2002. Tekst ustny w języku i w kulturze. Etnolingwistyka, 5, 27-30.]

Taylor, John R. (2003). Linguistic categorization. Prototypes in Linguistic Theory. 3rd ed. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

van Dijk, Teun. (Ed.). (1997). Discourse as Structure and Process. London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi: SAGE Publications.

Wierzbicka, Anna. (1992). Semantics, Culture and Cognition: Universal Human Concepts in Culture-Specific Configurations. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wilkoń, Aleksander. (1982). Język mówiony a pisany. Socjolingwistyka, 4, 19-33.

Whorf, Benjamin Lee. (1956). Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. Ed. John B. Carroll. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.

Translated by Adam Głaz

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Chapter 14 “Who is doing the thinking?” The concept of the THINKING SUBJECT in Polish

Dorota Filar UMCS, Lublin, Poland

1. Preliminaries

In this study I will focus on a small fragment of the linguistic worldview entrenched in contemporary Polish: the interpretation of the THINKING SUBJECT. First, a brief theoretical introduction will locate my research within the methodology of research on the linguistic worldview in connection with other assumptions of cognitive linguistics. Next, I will analyze linguistic data relating to several elements of the linguistic conceptualization of thinking: the analyses are not grounded in the objective (e.g. scientific) description of mental processes but illustrate the way in which thinking is interpreted in language. In the chapter’s title I use the term concept because the analysis of linguistic data is preceded by onomasiological assumptions. Importantly, the analysis is merely a narrow fragment of a broad and complex problem: I will focus on the idea that, as linguistic data show, thinking is subjective, i.e. it requires a thinking subject. This issue is broad and complex, and the discussion below will be limited to selected and narrowly defined conceptual patterns, as well as to a condensed characterization (a “skeletal” identification) of the subject of thinking as it is pictured in the “naive psychology” of Polish.

2. Theoretical foundations of the analysis

Contemporary cognitive linguistics, drawing on findings in neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and philosophy of mind, maintains that a comprehensive, integral semantic description of language requires conceptual background. Ronald Langacker uses the term conceptual semantics: he assumes that linguistic meaning reduces to conceptualization, i.e. “a meaning consists of both conceptual content and a particular way of construing that content” (Langacker, 2008, p. 43).

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The conceptual background of language and the ways of expressing it are the focal points of interest in research on the linguistic worldview. The conceptual structure entrenched in language does not entirely reflect non-linguistic reality; rather, it is an interpretation or a projection of the latter, motivated anthropocentrically through experience, culture, biology and people’s comprehensive knowledge of the world. Jerzy Bartmiński says that:

Linguistic worldview is a language-entrenched interpretation of reality, which can be expressed in the form of judgements about the world, people, things, events. It is an interpretation, not a reflection; it is a portrait without claims to fidelity, not a photograph of real object. The interpretation is a result of subjective perception and conceptualization of reality performed by the speakers of a given language; thus, it is clearly subjective and anthropocentric but also intersubjective (social). It unites people in a given social environment, creates a community of thoughts, feelings and values. It influences (to what extent is a matter for discussion) the perception and understanding of the social situation by a member of the community. (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 23)

Consider also Ryszard Tokarski’s definition of the linguistic worldview:

[It is] a set of regularities “contained” in categorial grammatical relations […] and semantic structures of lexis that show characteristic ways of perceiving individual components of the world and a more general understanding of the world’s organization, its hierarchies and values accepted by a linguistic community. (Tokarski, 2001, p. 358)

The two definitions, despite some differences, emphasize, first, the conceptual order of the judgments about the world expressed in language or implied by language units and their forms, second, the cultural and social grounding of language. Crucially, they underscore a subjective interpretation of the world by the members of a given linguistic and cultural community. Central in the studies on the linguistic worldview is the understanding of culture as a phenomenological and an ideational order. Says Ward Goodenough:

Culture is not a material phenomenon; it does not consist of things, people, behavior, or emotions. It is rather an organization of these things. It is the form of things that people have in mind, their models for perceiving, relating, and otherwise interpreting them. (Goodenough, 1964, p. 36)

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The conceptual aspect of meaning, the subjective, anthropocentric and cultural way of interpreting the world, and, above all, verification of meaning through analysis of linguistic data (grammar, lexis, texts) are the elements that I regard as significant distinctive features of the theory of the linguistic worldview. The methodology makes use of the terms developed by contemporary cognitive semantics, e.g. conceptual metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), conceptual/ semantic frames (e.g. Minsky, 1980; Fillmore, 1984), ICM (Lakoff, 1987), story schemas and scripts (Mandler, 1984), image schemas (e.g. Johnson, 1987; Lakoff, 1987; Hampe 2005), prototype theory (beginning with research by Eleanor Rosch, see Taylor, 2003); it has also been inspired by Ronald Langacker’s (1987; 2008) Cognitive Grammar. In studies on the linguistic worldview, these notions are found to be relevant and inspiring. In this study I refer to a theory of narrative schemas. Certainly, many other theoretical models offer important insights into the linguistic modeling of the concept of THINKING and allow for systematic description of the same: the analyses presented here only constitute a narrow fragment of a broad and complex issue.

3. Some Basic Conceptual Patterns in the linguistic Conceptualization of thinking

The category of THINKING does not have strictly defined language-imposed boundaries, yet commonsense rationality does not seek classical, strict definitions. In everyday communication people rarely conceptualize the process of thinking as a neural network activity or interpret it at the level of symbols (properties of the abstract mind) – these do not belong to the established colloquial linguistic view of thinking (although many speakers know about them). Indeed, to define thinking is a challenge for the linguist. Anna Wierzbicka writes:

“Thinking” is one of the fundamental human concepts. It is impossible to define it. Pseudo-definitions of this concept abound, of course, but they do not make it any clearer; on the contrary, they obscure its intuitively clear meaning. One example should suffice: here is the definition offered by The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language [...]: to think – “to have a thought” thought – “the act or process of thinking; cogitation” cogitation – “1. thoughtful consideration; 2. a serious thought” (Wierzbicka, 1998, p. 297).

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The examples of definitions that Wierzbicka cites are not only vague but also circular and a way out of the vicious circle must be sought. Lakoff & Johnson (1980) propose to analyze ontological metaphors (e.g. THE MIND IS A MACHINE; THE MIND IS A BRITTLE OBJECT; THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS; IDEAS ARE FOOD / PEOPLE / PLANTS / COMMODITIES). Jäkel (1997) offers a presentation of the abstract domain of MENTAL ACTIVITY by analyzing a complex Idealized Cognitive Model MENTAL ACTIVITY IS MANIPULATION and a series of cognitive metaphors (inter alia the ontological metaphor THE MIND IS A CONTAINER, or the metaphors IDEAS ARE OBJECTS, THE MIND IS A WORKSHOP, THE MIND IS A TOOL, THINKING IS WORKING ON A PROBLEM-OBJECT WITH THE MIND-TOOL, and many others). In etymological studies (cf. ESRY, 1973), the Polish verb myśleć ‘think’ is treated as a Slavic lexeme, originating from the Proto-Slavic root umъ (uměti), possibly meaning ‘reason, intellect, wit, mind, sense, thought.’ In many Slavic languages the root has survived and retained its association with the original meaning, e.g. the Russian um/ум means ‘reason, intellect.’ In Polish, the root can be found in, among others, umysł ‘mind,’ rozum ‘reason, intellect, mind,’ umiejętność ‘ability, skill,’ dumać ‘ponder, muse.’ These linguistic data point to the conceptual connection between thinking and the mind, reason, abilities.

3.1 Narrative conceptualization of thinking

Certain aspects of linguistic conceptualization may be represented by the schematic forms of narrative organization. Although narration is not the only means of understanding the world, it is a very important and natural one (cf. Trzebiński, 2002). One of the fundamental ways of analyzing cultures is an analysis of narrative models that they create (Bruner, 1987, p. 15). The universality of a narrative understanding of the world along the narrative structure of human knowledge also finds expression in the structure of stories as vehicles for expressing thoughts. I assume here that linguistic conceptualization of thinking may be viewed as a narrative structure. Conventional utterance schemas such as “X is thinking about…,” “X is thinking that…” suggest that in language we may interpret thinking as a kind of story created in the mind of the one who thinks. The story proceeds as a continuation of these schemas. According to psychological research, narrative schemas obligatorily consist of a number of constituents, e.g.:

(i) characters of a story […]; (ii) their values […], repertoires of major intentions of these characters and attendant plans for realization; (iii) possible complications that await characters during the realization of their intentions and plans; (iv) opportunities to overcome complications and to realize these intentions. (Trzebiński, 2002, p. 23)

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I propose here a narrative model that I hope captures the linguistic conceptualization, view, or image,1 of thinking. The model consists of five constituents that together compose the image of “someone thinking about something” or “someone thinking that something”:

1. SUBJECT (the one who thinks), the “narrator of the story”; 2. INTENTIONS, GOALS, VALUES attributed to the subject; 3. OBJECT, CONTENT, PROBLEM, “the matter of narration,” the realm of reality with which the thinking is concerned; 4. PROGRESS, ADVANCE, COURSE, STAGES of thinking understood as a sequence of ordered mental events; possibly overcoming complications and difficulties; 5. RESULTS, EFFECTS of thinking.

The model is only partly connected with the narrative schemas proposed in psychological research. It has a preliminary shape and I assume that detailed and wide-ranging research will help verify and add precision to some of its elements. I would like to focus now on the first constituent of the model, the subject of thinking. The problem itself is very broad and cannot be exhausted here: I will only attempt to outline the issue and present some essential directions for analysis.

3.2 Approaches to the subject

In the introduction to a volume on the subject in linguistics, Bartmiński and Pajdzińska say:

The problem of the subject and subjecthood has been discussed for centuries within various […] paradigms. The idea of the individual “I,” in which the subject is grounded, cannot be considered universal or even fully understandable beyond our cultural sphere. It originated in Ancient Greece. [...] With time, people have come to better realize the fundamental nature and enormous complexity of the issue. The difficulties inherent in the notion of the subject were already recognized by classical philosophers; the 20th century brought a radical crisis of subjecthood, but it also brought theories in which the notion is considered crucial. (Bartmiński & Pajdzińska, 2008, p. 7)

1 Although these terms are by no means equivalent (cf. Tabakowska this volume), I will treat them as such for convenience.

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Psychological approaches to the subject have been emerging gradually. For example, cognitive psychology

… concentrated on the process of the emergence and the functions of the SELF’s structure, locating the SELF in autobiographical memory. Although it may seem that knowledge about the origin, function, and structure of the subject is now substantial, since the 1990’s the SELF has again appeared to be ever more problematic, which is largely due to research on so-called automatic processing and the achievements of cognitive neuropsychology. (Francuz, 2008, p. 71)

In cognitive science, a subject is usually required to meet two conditions, the condition of naturalism and the condition of individualism:

A subject meeting the two conditions is recognized within the representational model, which derives from research on artificial intelligence. However, the model is criticized and an alternative one is proposed: the eco-phenomenal model of the subject, based on the concept of embodiment. (Muszyński, 2008, p. 85)

I will not discuss various aspects of general theoretical issues related to research on the concept of the subject in philosophy or psychology. Of several theories, Johnson’s (1987) notion of embodiment and the resultant experientialist approach seem directly relevant. The fundamental role of subjectivity in language is conspicuous in the research on linguistic worldview. The crucial notions of linguistic worldview are subject-oriented categories (rationality, system of values, perspective, point of view). Referring to the ideas of Ryszard Tokarski, Jerzy Barmiński (2009/2012, p. 89) writes: “They belong to a high level of linguistic organization, on which there is obligatorily the figure of a human being as an interpreter and ‘organiser of the scene.’” The fundamental role of language in the conceptualization of subjectivity also appears in Émile Benveniste’s approach: “It is in and through language that man constitutes himself as a subject. […] “Ego” is he who says ‘ego’” (Benveniste, 1971 [1958], p. 224). The reconstruction of the linguistic image of the thinking subject may thus begin with the statement that in linguistic conceptualization the thinking subject is the one that we say is doing the thinking. I am going to reconstruct a fragment of the linguistic view of thinking on the basis of systemic data, conventionalized texts, and creative ones (aphorisms and poetry). Although creativity is a distinctive feature of aphorisms and poetry, “the

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latter do not lack what is entrenched in language system (Pajdzińska & Tokarski, 1996)” (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 37).2

3.3 The subjective character of thinking

The naive, colloquial image of thinking is to some extent consistent with Descartes’ maxim “I think, therefore I am”: if thinking occurs, there must exist someone who thinks. The image of thinking established in language implies the existence of a thinking subject. The semantic and grammatical structure of the verb myśleć ‘think’ obligatorily requires the assumption of the subject. This is confirmed both by sentences indicating a specified subject of thinking (cf. (1) below) and by those in which the subject is not clearly specified (2). The existence of the thinking subject is obvious even if we do not know or cannot see him or her but we notice only the “results of thinking” (3). Contexts in which the verb myśleć is accompanied by the pronoun nikt ‘nobody’ do not evoke the image of “subjectless thinking” but introduce different implications, e.g. “no one but me/no one but he who is saying this,” “no one but he who is being talked about” and the like (4). The fact of speaking about thinking obligatorily introduces an existential presupposition:3 “thinking occurs because there exists someone who thinks.”

(1) Anna myśli o egzaminie. ‘Anna is thinking about an examination.’

(2) Niektórzy myślą, że wzrost cen jest dotkliwy. ‘Some think that the rise in prices is painful.’

(3) Wygląda na to, że ktoś o tym pomyślał. ‘It looks like someone has thought about it.’

(4) Nikt nie pomyślał, że Adam jest samotny. ‘It occurred to no-one [no-one thought] that Adam is/was lonely.’

Just as every instance of language use implies the existence of the speaking subject, so too the concept of THINKING cannot be expressed without assuming

2 Cf. Vaňková this volume for a more in-depth account. 3 Grzegorczykowa (2001, p. 147) notes that existential presuppositions were first identified by logicians (e.g. Frege).

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the thinking subject. This fundamental thesis is facetiously capitalized on by the Polish aphorist Stanisław J. Lec, who suggests that it is too obvious to verbalize:

(5) Do myślenia potrzebny jest mózg, nie mówiąc już o człowieku. ‘It takes a brain to do the thinking, to say nothing of a human being.’ (Lec, 2006, p. 33)

For someone to think, they must have an efficient brain that does what it is supposed to. However, the brain as the organ of thinking is not the ultimate subject of thinking: thinking requires “a complete human being,” with all the subjective features associated with the word człowiek ‘(a) human (being).’4 In the analysis below I seek a fundamental language-entrenched characterization of the subject of thinking, i.e. the features that language “attributes” to the one who thinks. As a result of the anthropocentric organization of language, the verb myśleć ‘think’ is above all associated with humans. However, animals as subjects of thinking are also acceptable (6).5 In contrast, a sentence that associates thinking with plants appears to be acceptable only in a metaphorical sense (7), while an advertisement that grants the ability to think to an inanimate object (8) is definitely a kind of language game, a creative metaphor.6 The Polish language allows for the subject of thinking to be first of all a person (and, by extension, most animals).

(6) Piesek myślał, że chcesz go pogłaskać. ‘The doggy thought you were going to pet it.’

(7) Roślinka myślała, że ją podlejesz. ‘The little plant thought/was hoping you would water it.’

(8) Krzesło, które myśli za Ciebie – ćwiczysz siedząc prawidłowo. ‘The chair that thinks for you: you actually exercise as you sit in the correct position.’

4 This is just a possible interpretation, the most likely one in my opinion. The aphorism is certainly ambiguous, as, by definition, are all the aphorisms cited here. 5 The question of which animate beings and under what circumstances are attributed with the ability to think by popular judgment will not be dealt with here (the problem is interesting but requires a separate treatment). 6 Another issue worthy of a separate account is certainly the question of how the category of similarity determines the conventional attribution of human mental activities to objects (thinking machines, intelligent houses, etc.).

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3.4 “Where” does thinking occur?

Lec’s aphorism (5) points to the brain as the organ used in thinking. However, the brain (Pol. mózg) is found relatively seldom in the colloquial Polish “naive anatomy” of people. Rather, etymological considerations suggest that there are linguistic and conceptual ties of thinking with umysł ‘mind, intellect, reason.’7 Umysł is understood as a certain ‘set of features and cognitive functions,’ ‘a person’s non-physical sphere,’ e.g. praca umysłowa ‘white-collar work, intellectual work’ is ‘work in which the mind is actively employed, non-manual labor’; rozwój umysłowy ‘mental/intellectual development’ is the development of a person’s non-physical abilities and functions; genialny / przenikliwy / badawczy / chłonny / głęboki / wybitny umysł ‘brilliant / astute / inquiring / receptive / insightful / outstanding mind’ are positive assessments of someone’s intellectual abilities, while ciasny / leniwy / ograniczony / płytki / tępy umysł ‘narrow / idle / shallow / dull mind’ are negative judgments.8 But the meaning of umysł is limited to functions associated with thinking. As the English mind, the Polish word pertains to many other non-physical human properties, e.g. personality traits (SFJP 1985). The linguistic image of thinking is therefore an element of the linguistically established image of the whole of people’s non-physical, mental sphere. It can be said that the linguistic image of thinking contains the belief that “thinking occurs in beings that have the mind,” and it is in the mind that “thinking takes place.” However, the mind is portrayed in language as an abstraction that defies simple verification, which is why Polish does not admit (in the literal, non-metaphorical or non-creative sense) of word collocations such as *zobaczyć umysł ‘see the mind,’ *dotknąć umysłu ‘touch the mind,’ or *usłyszeć umysł ‘hear the mind.’ Nor does Polish interpret in any concrete way the “location” of the mind; it thus does not provide a simple answer to the question of which beings possess the mind and therefore can – in their linguistic portrayals – be subjects of thinking. Therefore, when reconstructing the linguistic view of thinking, I have sought another term – a basic-level term as the best candidate – that could name and characterize, in a cognitively and linguistically distinct way, “that in which thinking occurs” and “he who thinks.” That other Polish lexeme, etymologically related to myślenie ‘thinking,’ is rozum ‘reason, sense, wit, intellect.’ In Polish, rozum denotes ‘that element of the mind that is responsible for thinking,

7 See Vasmer’s ESRY (1973). In contemporary Polish lexis the connection between the lexemes umysł ‘mind’ and myśleć ‘think’ is found in e.g. umyślić ‘think up, plan (in the mind).’ 8 These expressions can also be used metonymically: Poznał Pan Profesora X? To genialny umysł! ‘Have you met Professor X? He is a brilliant mind!”

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knowing, seeking logical connections and relationships.’ The verb rozumieć coś ‘understand something’ can best be defined as ‘know what something is all about, what the problem is,’ or ‘see sense or logic in something.’ The word rozumowanie ‘reasoning’ can be regarded in some contexts as synonymous to myślenie ‘thinking.’ Another meaning of rozum is ‘the ability to cope in life,’ therefore rozumny człowiek ‘a sensible / reasonable person’ is ‘a person who acts sensibly/reasonably and can foresee the consequences of their actions.’ Like umysł, the noun rozum also occurs in many collocations with words that characterize its features,9 e.g. jasny / przenikliwy / dojrzały / otwarty / wielki rozum ‘lucid / insightful / mature / open / great mind/intellect’ (positive characteristics) or krótki / ograniczony / pospolity rozum ‘narrow / dull / ordinary mind/intellect’ (negative characteristics).10 Similarly to the linguistic image of the mind, the linguistic image of reason (sense, intellect, wit) contains the features of ‘abstraction’ that ‘defies direct (physical) verification.’ However, there do exist conventionalized Polish expressions that “locate” reason in a specific body organ: ktoś ma rozum w głowie or nie ma rozumu w głowie, lit. ‘someone has sense/reason in their head’ or ‘has no sense in their head’; komuś brakuje rozumu w głowie, lit. ‘someone lacks sense in their head’; ktoś idzie/skacze/sięga po rozum do głowy, lit. ‘someone goes/ jumps/reaches for sense into their head’ (i.e. ‘uses their brains’). Consider also the proverb Co głowa to rozum ‘So many heads, so many minds,’ i.e. ‘Everyone has their own sense or judgment.’ We are dealing here with the metaphor THE HEAD IS THE CONTAINER FOR SENSE, THOUGHTS, REASON, INTELLECT AND KNOWLEDGE (cf. Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, or Jäkel, 1997). Clearly, mental processes are portrayed in Polish as occurring in this specific location. Consider also, to the same effect, the following colloquial collocations, well-established metaphorical expressions, or derivatives from the noun head ‘głowa’: głowić się/główkować ‘rack one’s brains’ (lit. ‘head oneself’); łamać sobie głowę ‘rack one’s brains, think of something intensely without being able to find the solution’ (lit. ‘break one’s head’); ruszyć głową ‘think’ (lit. ‘move one’s head’); pracować głową ‘do intellectual work’ or ‘think seeking a solution’ (lit. ‘work with one’s head’). When someone is thinking about something intensely, we say that ktoś ma głowę pełną myśli o czymś ‘someone has their head full of thoughts about something’ or ma głowę nabitą myślami ‘has their head crammed with thoughts.’ When komuś rozjaśnia się w głowie ‘somebody’s head clears up,’ it means that ‘someone has understood, grasped the sense of something’ and therefore can think clearly – jasno myśleć.

9 Skorupka’s SFJP (1985) records 61 collocation groups (some of them containing several synonymous units) with the word rozum. 10 Cf. also mieć kurzy rozum ‘be a birdbrain,’ lit. ‘have a hen’s reason.’

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Only sometimes is the “location” of thinking in Polish other than the head, e.g. the soul or spirit. When we speak of thoughts hidden before other people, we use expressions w głębi duszy ‘deep in one’s soul’ or w duchu ‘in spirit.’ While reason is linguistically conceptualized as something that is in the head, the soul is not assigned to any part of the body in its linguistic portrayal – rather, it resides in the whole of the body: W zdrowym ciele zdrowy duch ‘A sound mind in a sound body’ or Wielka dusza w małym ciele ‘A great soul in a small body’ (THE BODY IS A CONTAINER FOR THE SOUL).

3.5 Symptoms of thinking

Apparently, there exist certain symptoms or external manifestations of the process of thinking. These are various features of someone’s appearance, signals of thinking, e.g. facial expressions (the appearance of the face or eyes), verbal behavior, gestures, motor activities of the body, and calculated actions. The head is a kind of container for thoughts, ideas, the mind, sense, or intelligence, while the front part of the human head, twarz ‘face,’ has the ability to express what is going on “inside the container.” Thus, we say that people have myślące / inteligentne / mądre twarze ‘thinking / intelligent / wise faces’ or twarze bezmyślne / tępe ‘thoughtless / blank / dull faces,’ which means that their faces can show their ability or inability to think profound thoughts (9). Zamyślona twarz ‘a pensive/contemplative face, lost in thought’ or wyraz zamyślenia na czyjejś twarzy ‘the contemplative look on someone’s face’ are expressions that refer to a person who is pondering over something at the moment (10). Polish enables us to talk about situations in which the human face shows an effort connected with a difficult mental operation (11). Other linguistic expressions show the belief that facial expressions manifest someone’s inability to understand a situation, certain ideas or thoughts (12).

(9) Ona mi się podoba: ma bystrą, myślącą twarz. ‘I like her: her face is clever, thinking.’

(10) Z wyrazem zamyślenia na twarzy pochylił się nad listem. ‘He bent over the letter, a pensive/contemplative expression on his face.’

(11) Zmarszczyła czoło, zamknęła oczy; na jej twarzy malował się wyraz głębokiego namysłu. ‘She wrinkled her forehead, closed her eyes, an expression of intense consideration on her face.’

(12) Bezmyślny uśmiech zdradzał, że nic nie zrozumiała. ‘Her thoughtless smile revealed that she did not understand anything.’

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The linguistic image of thinking particularly emphasizes the role of the eyes as the element of the face that most directly expresses human intellectual conditions and intellectual predispositions. Another person’s eyes or gaze can be described as myślące ‘thoughtful,’ skupione ‘focused,’ zamyślone ‘pensive, contemplative,’ pełne zrozumienia ‘full of understanding’ or as bezmyślne ‘thoughtless’ or tępe ‘dull.’ The semantic potential associated with indications of symptoms of thinking is also contained in names for certain gestures, e.g. rubbing one’s forehead or propping up one’s head, although in Polish there are no lexical units that would directly associate the names of these gestures with thinking. However, the potential can be easily recognized in colloquial utterances (13) and in creative texts that make full use of the semantic load of language units (14).

(13) Siedziała z głową podpartą rękami i głęboko nad czymś myślała. ‘She was sitting with her head propped up with her hands, lost in thought over something.’

(14)

Palec wskazujący podpiera skroń, The index finger supporting the temple, dotyka opuszką zmęczonego miejsca touching the tired spot with its tip pod czaszką, beneath the skull, w tej akurat półkuli mózgowej, in the hemisphere która jest bliższa oczom czytelnika, that is closer to the reader’s eyes, więc skwapliwie myśli. so he is eagerly thinking. (Stanisław Barańczak, Fotografia pisarza [“A Writer’s Photo”] transl. from Barańczak, 1993)

The excerpt from Barańczak’s poem in (14) ironically describes a posed photograph in which a person is trying hard to make an impression of someone lost in thought. The person’s gestures are referred to with palec wskazujący podpiera skroń ‘the index finger supporting the temple,’ and dotyka zmęczonego miejsca pod czaszką ‘touching the tired spot below the skull,’ therefore skwapliwie myśli ‘he is eagerly thinking.’ The linguistic image of thinking also entails a connection between thinking and speaking: verbal behavior can give clues about the thinking process. This is directly referred to in the collocations wypowiadać myśli ‘express one’s thoughts, opinions,’ wcielać myśli w słowa ‘translate thoughts into words,’ or in the proverb Co w myśli, to i na języku ‘Whatever’s in the mind, it’s on the tongue.’ However, there are also expressions testifying to the contrary: pleść, co ślina na język przyniesie ‘talk off the top of one’s head’ (lit. ‘whatever saliva brings forth on

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the tongue’), pleść trzy po trzy ‘talk rubbish’ (lit. ‘three by three’), gadać bez sensu ‘talk nonsense’ and many others. Someone’s words, utterances, and actions can be assessed for their connection to thinking. In linguistic interpretation, what is well-considered is generally valued higher and judged as better than what we refer to with the word nieprzemyślane ‘ill-considered, ill-judged.’ An even more negative judgment is contained in the word bezmyślny ‘thoughtless,’ which can collocate with czyn ‘deed,’ krok ‘step,’ zachowanie ‘behavior,’ działanie ‘action,’ wypowiedź ‘statement.’ The Polish language therefore contains the belief that thinking can have “pragmatic value”: it generally serves well those who think, on condition that they preserve the order of thinking first, then speaking or acting (cf. the popular saying Pomyśl dwa razy, zanim coś powiesz (zrobisz) ‘Think twice before you say (do) something’). A humorous observation that this order is not always maintained can be found in another aphorism by Lec (15):

(15) Czyn dogania myśl. Biada, gdy ją przegoni. ‘Deed catches up with thought. Woe when it overtakes it.’ (Lec, 2006, p. 164)

This provokes another question: does Polish contain an established general belief that all of us think?

3.6 Do all of us think?

The Polish language contains the belief that thinking occurs when certain conditions have been fulfilled. There has to be someone (an animate being, primarily a human, also an animal) who acts as the subject of thinking. This subject has to have “that which thinking occurs in”: the mind/wit/intellect, soul, brain – although the basic-level term for the “location of thinking” is głowa ‘head.’ Third, we can say that someone is thinking if we see specific symptoms of thinking (facial expression, verbal behavior, actions). However, do we believe that – in accordance with the interpretation established in language – all beings capable of thinking really think? In particular, do they think “to the same degree”? A similar question is asked by Lec with characteristic irony (16):

(16) Czy w określeniu to człowiek myślący kryje się komplement dla ludzkości? ‘That is a thinking person. Is there a compliment to humanity in that description?’ (Lec, 2006, p. 19)

People are thinking beings, as it were by definition (Homo sapiens). Should not the statement that someone thinks entail that they are human? Potentially,

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every person is capable of thinking. But the sentence: “That is a thinking person” isolates one person who implements this ability. The analysis of Lec’s wordplay may serve as an introduction to reconstructing language-entrenched judgments. The Polish data portray the ability to think as dependent on many factors. The objective ones are age, partially gender, and illness. Myśleć jak dziecko (mieć dziecinny umysł) ‘think like a child (have a childish mind)’ means ‘to think less efficiently, more naively than an adult does.’ Dojrzałe myślenie ‘mature thinking’ emerges as a positive result of the passage of time. In Polish culture, age is associated with wisdom; nevertheless, in the linguistic image it is not always interpreted as conducive to effective thinking, cf. the proverb Nie każda głowa siwa mądra bywa ‘Not all grey heads are wise.’11 The gender criterion with regard to assessing the ability to think is not conspicuous in the colloquial structures of Polish; it is stressed at most in the expression męski umysł ‘manly mind’ (i.e. logical, “matter-of-fact”) or in the proverb Włos długi, rozum krótki ‘Long on hair and short on brains’ (i.e., stereotypically, women have long hair but little brain). In contrast, this criterion can be found in popular thinking (jokes, films, and other texts of culture). The factors that reduce the ability to think also include illness: cf. choroba umysłowa ‘mental disease,’ człowiek umysłowo chory ‘a mentally ill person,’ niedorozwinięty umysłowo ‘(mentally) retarded,’ niepełnosprawny umysłowo ‘mentally disabled’ – the expressions denote people who, from the medical point of view, do not equal average healthy persons in mental efficiency. Interestingly, similar colloquial phrases chory na głowę, lit. ‘head-sick,’ or chory na umyśle ‘brain-sick’ denote persons who say or do something very stupid or unreasonable. Age, gender, or illness are objectively ascertainable factors but the assessment of how others think can be also more subjective. Polish contains many expressions that involve positive or negative judgments of someone’s thinking or intellectual capacity. A negative assessment may use the metaphor of “an inadequate container for thoughts,” e.g. in the expressions ciasna / pusta / zakuta / tępa głowa, lit. ‘narrow / empty / dull / obtuse head,’ which metonymically describe people with very little ability to think. The expressions ośla głowa ‘dimwit’ (lit. ‘donkey head’), barania głowa/łeb ‘muttonhead,’ ptasi/ kurzy móżdżek ‘birdbrain,’ ptasi rozum ‘birdbrain’ (lit. ‘bird-mind’) are, in turn, descriptions of people who are poorly assessed in comparison with those who have “human” heads and therefore “adequate” minds. The anthropocentric organization of language attributes to humans a higher value than to animals.

11 There is an additional problem with the phrase być mądrym ‘be wise,’ whose meaning is related to that of the verb myśleć ‘think’ but complete synonymy certainly does not obtain.

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Therefore, if Polish endows animals with the ability to think, its quality is nevertheless lower than that attributed to people: some persons are rated so low that their ability to think equals that of animals. Furthermore, kapuściana głowa ‘numskull’ (lit. ‘cabbage head’) compares the content of the human head to cabbage leaves. Next, człowiek bez głowy ‘a headless person’ designates someone devoid of the ability to think; tracić głowę ‘lose one’s head’ means ‘lose the ability to think, lose common sense.’ Interestingly enough, the expression ktoś stracił głowę ‘someone lost their head’ may denote a transient condition, with the reverse meaning being coded by ktoś odzyskał zdrowy rozum ‘someone regained their common sense.’ In Polish, we most often say that ktoś stracił głowę dla kogoś ‘someone lost their head for somebody’ (fell in love with them) or w jakiejś sytuacji ‘in some (difficult) situation.’12 Some expressions interpret thinking as a process that occurs only when the thinking subject makes a specific effort. Some people make this effort, others do not. In the linguistic conceptualization, thinking is therefore a kind of consciously performed action. One of the metaphors well-established in Polish compares thinking with work, which is illustrated with collocations of the type praca umysłowa ‘intellectual (non manual) work,’ pracować głową ‘work with one’s head’ (intellectually), główka pracuje ‘thinking in progress’ (lit. ‘head- DIM is working’) and the like. As is the case with any action, the subject may consciously stop thinking (17), find the action of thinking impossible to do (18) or may consciously refrain from it (19). When, however, the “work” is progressing effectively, its objective and product is a thought, idea, concept, conviction, belief, conclusion, etc. (20). The thought thus understood has its “owner/creator,” the subject who brought it into being and gave it a shape. Therefore, the noun myśl ‘thought, idea’ and its synonyms are combined with possessive pronouns/ adjectives or with other markers of the “owner” of the thought (21).

(17) Nie będę o tym dłużej myśleć, teraz zajmę się czymś innym. ‘I will no longer think about it; now I’m going to do something else.’

(18) Dziś po prostu w ogóle nie mogę myśleć. ‘I simply can’t think at all today.’

(19) Nigdy nie zamierzałem i dalej nie zamierzam tracić czasu na myślenie o tym. ‘I have never intended to and I still do not intend to waste my time thinking about this.’

12 These are only selected examples of judgments on the human ability to think: the Polish lexis contains many more, omitted here because of space constraints.

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(20) Długo myślał o tym, aż w jego głowie zrodził się ten pomysł. ‘He had been thinking about it for a long time until this idea was conceived in his mind.’

(21) Nie zgadzam się, że to tylko jej pomysł; to wspólna myśl całego zespołu. ‘I refuse to say it’s only her idea; it’s the whole team’s idea.’

However, in Polish there are many well-established metaphors expressing the belief that thought is not always an outcome of a conscious thinking process. Thought is sometimes conceptualized as an element of the external world, which, independently of the human will, can wpaść/przyjść/strzelić komuś do głowy, lit. ‘fall into/come/shoot into someone’s head’ (22); we also say that natrętna myśl powraca/nurtuje/nie daje komuś spokoju ‘a nagging thought/idea returns/ bothers/does not leave someone alone’ (23) or that ktoś nie może opędzić się od natrętnych myśli ‘someone cannot get rid of nagging thoughts.’ The “initiator” of thinking is thus not the subject him- or herself but an external element that “finds” someone, “attacks” them, “makes itself be felt” by them or accidentally “falls” into their head.

(22) Odkąd przyszła mi do głowy myśl o nowym domu, nie mogę myśleć o niczym innym. ‘Since the idea of having a new house occurred to me, I can’t think about anything else.’

(23) Ciągle prześladuje mnie myśl, że o czymś zapomniałam. ‘I have been constantly bothered by the thought that I have forgotten something.’

However, despite the “passivity” of thinking so conceptualized, someone who thinks still remains the only subject of thinking. The ostensibility of the conviction that thoughts “come from the outside” by “themselves,” without anyone’s participation, is exposed by Lec in (24):

(24) Do głowy wpadają pomysły od wewnątrz. ‘It is from the inside that ideas fly into the mind/head.’ (Lec, 2006, p. 125)

Lec questions the language-entrenched belief that a person is “subordinate” to their thoughts: ideas do not come to the mind from the outside, as the colloquial metaphor has it, but they do so “from the inside,” from within the thinking subject, even if the latter is not aware of it. The aphorist opposes the popular belief that in some situations people can be absolved from responsibility for their thoughts; instead, he assigns full responsibility to the thinking subject.

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4. Conclusion

The remarks above open a broad research area pertaining to how the process of thinking is conceptualized in language – many interesting problems have not been dealt with in the analysis. My main goal has been to show the linguistic conceptualization of the subject of thinking, as it is entrenched in the Polish language. The conclusions derived from linguistic data relate to popular judgment. To speakers of Polish (but also English and probably many other languages), they may seem obvious: this in fact is an argument in favor of the coherence of language and the human conceptual world. The two domains “absorb” the totality of people’s knowledge of the world, biologically determined experiences, and culture. In order to reconstruct the judgments entrenched in the Polish language, I began with well-established lexical-semantic data: words and their meanings, collocations, and lexicalized metaphors. I then referred to texts: both to conventionalized examples and to creative uses (aphorisms and poetry). Texts have a special value for showing the semantic potential of words, emphasize meanings embedded in experience and culture, meanings that are understood by language users but are not always discernible from an analysis of lexis alone (cf. Vaňková, this volume). I would like to treat the image of the thinking subject, an inextricable part of the linguistic conceptualization of thinking, as one of the five elements in a dynamic, narrative model of thinking (section 3.1). The thinking subject is the first – and the key – component of the model.

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References

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Bartmiński, Jerzy. (2009/2012). Aspects of Cognitive Ethnolinguistics. Ed. Jörg Zinken. Sheffield and Oakville, CT: Equinox.

Bartmiński, Jerzy, & Pajdzińska, Anna. (1998). Od redakcji. In Jerzy Bartmiński & Anna Pajdzińska (Eds.), Podmiot w języku i kulturze (pp. 7-8). Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

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Bruner, Jerome. (1987). Life as a narrative. Social Research 54 (1): 1-32.

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Grzegorczykowa, Renata. (2001). Wprowadzenie do semantyki językoznawczej. Warszawa: PWN.

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Lakoff, George, & Johnson, Mark. (1980).Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

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Langacker, Ronald W. (2008). Cognitive Grammar. A Basic Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lec, Stanisław Jerzy. (2006). Myśli nieuczesane wszystkie. Warszawa: Noir sur Blanc.

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Taylor, John R. (2003). Linguistic Categorization. Prototypes in Linguistic Theory. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Wierzbicka, Anna. (1998). THINK – a universal human concept and a conceptual primitive. In Jacek J. Jadacki & Witold Strawiński (Eds.), In the World of Signs (pp. 297-308). Amsterdam-Atlanta, GA: Editions Rodopi B.V.

Translated by Jerzy Adamko, Dorota Filar, and Adam Głaz

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Chapter 15 The concept of NIEWOLNIK ‘slave’ in Polish: an ethnolinguistic panchronic reconnaissance

Aneta Wysocka UMCS, Lublin, Poland

1. Introduction

The aim of this study is to abstract, from broadly understood linguistic data, a set of common propositions about the category of people denoted by the Polish noun niewolnik ‘slave.’ In other words, my general goal is to reconstruct the stereotype of the slave entrenched in the Polish language. My approach is consistent in its methodology with the tradition of the Lublin School of Ethnolinguistics.1 A constitutive element of this tradition is the attention it pays to the worldview of a given community, which is reflected in the lexical units and grammatical structures of its language and which comes to the fore in a variety of contexts in which the units of language are used.2 The concept of NIEWOLNIK is particularly interesting as an object of research on the relationships between language and other components of culture (Polish, in this case), for at least two reasons. First, it is strongly linked with the category

1 The main object of interest in this model of linguistic description are not lexical or grammatical units themselves but their “conceptual correlates” or the stereotypes that lie at the interface between words (or syntactic structures) and the portions of the external world to which they refer (Bartmiński, 2006, p. 82). 2 The cultural and cognitive approach that this school represents has its origin in German and American anthropological linguistics (Humboldt, Sapir and Whorf, Malinowski, and others) and in Russian semiotic and cultural studies (cf. Bartmiński, 1980, 1986, 1998, 2006, 2009/2012; Bartmiński & Tokarski, 1993; Pajdzińska & Tokarski, 1996; Pajdzińska, 2004; Tokarski, 2001). It should also be mentioned that (despite having been developed independently) the methodology in question has many points of convergence with American cognitive linguistics. The distinctive characteristics of the research model developed in Lublin seem to be the focus on the culture-specific components of the linguistic worldview and the caution it takes in formulating hypotheses about the cross- cultural or universal nature of observed phenomena. An important inspirational role is played here by Anna Wierzbicka (1992, 1996).

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of FREEDOM, which is a crucial value in Polish culture.3 Second, the political situation of the Polish people throughout the 19th century resembled that of a colonized nation. The period between 1795 and 1918, when Poland was divided between Prussia, Russia and Austria, is very deeply rooted in Poles’ collective memory.4 The time when Poland was absent from maps of Europe is commonly referred to as niewola ‘enslavement,’ and the picture of the enslaved nation has served as a point of reference in public discourse about – variously understood – autonomy at different moments of Polish subsequent history. Researchers interested in linguistic worldview need to consider different types of data. Investigation of lexis and grammar (the language system) is a good starting point, but other sources of information are also required. First and foremost, there are texts, in which common propositions are presupposed or expressed explicitly (the latter applies in particular to conventionalized texts with a broad circulation, such as proverbs or jokes). Additionally, knowledge about the beliefs and customs of a linguistic community is taken into account, in accordance with

3 Bartmiński (2009/2012) relates to the ideas of Głowiński (1986), and notes that according to the latter, a community rests on “specific practical, cultural and moral values, so called ‘entrusted values.’ For example, the entrusted values for Poles and many other European nations are freedom and sovereignty, peace and well-being, democracy and solidarity. Values bridge over language and culture. They lie at the core of culture; they constitute the very foundation of language and the basic component of all speech” (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 12). 4 An interesting reflection on this issue is offered by Ryszard Kapuściński, who describes his futile attempts to overcome the African stereotype of “white people” by showing the internal diversity of Europeans and the special status of the Polish nation among them: I could not adequately resolve the question of guilt. In their eyes, I was guilty. Slavery, colonialism, five hundred years of injustice – after all, it’s the white men’s doing. The white men’s. Therefore mine. Mine? I was not able to conjure within myself that cleansing, liberating emotion – guilt; to show contrition; to apologize. On the contrary! From the start, I tried to counterattack: “you were colonized? We, Poles, were also! For one hundred and thirty years we were the colony of three foreign powers. White ones too.” They laughed, tapped their foreheads, walked away. I angered them because they thought I wanted to deceive them. I knew that despite my inner certainty about my own innocence, to them I was guilty. These barefoot, hungry, and illiterate boys had a moral advantage over me, the sole advantage an accursed history bestows upon its victims. With rare exceptions, they, the black men, had never conquered anybody, hadn’t occupied, hadn’t enslaved. They could regard me from a position of superiority. They were of black race, but a pure one. I stood among them weak, with nothing more to say. (Kapuściński, 2002 [1998], pp. 40-41) In this context consider also the etymology of the word Slavs, the name of the ethnic group that Poles belong to. The endogenic ethnic name Słowi•anin comes from Proto- Slavic *slovo ‘speech’ (Boryś, 2005), but its equivalents in many European languages (among them the English words Slav and slave; cf. Oxford Dictionaries, 2013) are, directly or indirectly, derived from the Latin noun sclavus. The association between Slavs and slaves is not only a matter of linguistic history and a trace of the distant past of Slavs: even today this etymology is invoked in public discourse (it is enough to browse websites containing the pun Slavus-sclavus).

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Sapir’s claim that “[t]he understanding of a simple poem, for instance, involves not merely an understanding of the single words in their average significance, but a full comprehension of the whole life of the community as it is mirrored in the words, or as it is suggested by their overtones” (Sapir, 1929, pp. 209-210). The methodology of the Lublin School of Ethnolinguistics also includes experimental methods, such as questionnaires, but these will not be used here. In keeping with what has been said above, let us begin with systemic data. The Polish lexeme niewolnik is morphologically divided as: nie•wol•nik. Unlike its English counterpart, slave, it does not come from Latin but is derived from an indigenous adjective wolny ‘free.’ The prefixnie- expresses negation, and the suffix -nik denotes ‘a person of a certain kind.’ The stem -wol has its roots in Proto-Indo- European *wel and is also present in the Polish abstract noun wola ‘will’ (as well as in its English equivalent). Thus, the structural meaning of the lexeme niewolnik, which is still clear to native speakers, can be elucidated as ‘someone who is not free’ or ‘someone who is deprived of their will.’5 In actual use, however, the word niewolnik names a narrower category, and, in fact, Polish does not distinguish lexically the entire class of people who are not free (there is no single noun to designate such a category), yet it does distinguish some subcategories. Dictionaries of synonyms (SWB, 1995; DSS, 2004) list several lexemes with the generic semantic component ‘someone who is not free’: więzień ‘prisoner,’ osadzony ‘prisoner’ (lit. ‘someone who has been placed in jail’), skazany/skazaniec ‘convict,’ aresztant ‘arrestee,’ jeniec ‘prisoner of war,’ internowany ‘detainee,’ zakładnik ‘hostage,’ porwany ‘kidnappee,’ zesłaniec ‘deportee,’ braniec arch. ‘captive, especially someone held prisoner for ransom by Turks or Tatars.’6 They are to some extent synonymous, although none of them is an exact semantic equivalent of niewolnik. The feature that differentiates niewolnik from other nouns in the semantic field of ‘people who are not free’ is ‘being owned, belonging to somebody’: the lexeme implies the existence of an economic system in which the relation of ownership between one person and another is possible. The idea of ownership as a constitutive semantic component is mentioned in lexicographic definitions of niewolnik in each of the dictionaries of the Polish language I have consulted, from Linde’s early 19th-c. SJPLin (1807-1814)7 to the modern USJP (2003).

5 The latter definition appears in the first dictionary of the Polish language, Linde’s SJPLin (1807-1814). 6 The feminine form branka is much better known and more frequent. The nouns braniec and branka could also be considered hyponyms of niewolnik ‘slave’ and niewolnica ‘female slave,’ respectively. 7 Linde, in his definition of niewolnik, both evokes and downplays the idea of a person being “owned”: “niewolnik – a person who as if belongs to somebody else” (emphasis A.W.). The attitude of the lexicographer can be explained given the inspiration that he drew from the ideas of the Polish Enlightenment.

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This brief review of lexicographic data makes it possible to propose the general category (genus proximum) ‘not being free’ and the distinguishing feature (differentia specifica) ‘being owned’ for the lexeme niewolnik, at which point the classical procedure of defining would probably terminate. In this study, however, it is only the first step towards a definition because the knowledge of the definitional characteristics alone does not suffice to predict what niewolnik can mean in creative contexts, or what it is that speakers of Polish have in mind when they use this word. Why have certain propositions entered this concept? What role have history, customs, and the system of values played in shaping its semantic structure? To approach the answers to these questions, I am going to analyze three types of data: lexicographic definitions of niewolnik,8 lexical units that are formally or semantically related to it, and selected texts in which the noun is used. Admittedly, the selection of representative texts is to some extent subjective: the study is a reconnaissance rather than a complete semantic description. I have taken into consideration some items from the canon of school reading and two types of stereotyped texts: proverbs and jokes (these genres are based on common knowledge, which makes them valuable sources in ethnolinguistic research).

2. Historical and cultural circumstances that a typical niewolnik is commonly associated with

2.1 Africans in the colonial era

Unsurprisingly, there is considerable lexical and textual evidence suggesting that a typical niewolnik is a person of a particular race: a black person. Dictionaries of general Polish and its social varieties list lexicalized metaphors that corroborate this: Murzyn ‘a Negro’ is defined as (i) a ‘slave,’ (ii) ‘somebody who does another person’s job without revealing their participation,’ (iii) ‘somebody who does a particularly hard and unrewarding job,’ (iv) ‘somebody who is illegally employed.’9 These semantic derivatives clearly show a strong link between the

8 They not only reveal the semantic components abstracted by the lexicographers from their databases, but each definition can also unveil the worldview of its author as well as the categories characteristic of the humanistic discourse of the time, as in the case of Linde’s dictionary (see previous note). 9 The metaphor is probably motivated by the belief that an illegal worker usually does hard and unappreciated work. Illegal workers of this kind are also referred to in Polish with the word gastarbeiter, of German origin: this shows that members of the Polish community think of themselves as employees rather than as employers (the latter are Germans).

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concepts NIEWOLNIK and BLACK PERSON. Both concepts contain propositions of ‘working for somebody’ and ‘doing the job someone else does not want to do.’ These propositions are reflected in most of the lexicographic definitions of niewolnik. They motivate such idioms as pracować jak Murzyn ‘work very hard’ (lit. ‘like a Negro’), or zdawać egzamin na Murzyna ‘to take an exam in someone else’s place, pretending to be them’ (lit. ‘to take an exam Negro-style’); one can also be biały Murzyn, lit. ‘a white Negro,’ i.e. ‘somebody who does a hard, unrewarding, and poorly-paid job, although they are white.’ The propositions are also reflected in the offensive nickname for black persons, i.e.niewolnik (not listed in dictionaries but sporadically appearing in usage, cf. Passent, 1987), in jokes about black people10 and in the proverb: Murzyn zrobił swoje, Murzyn może odejść, lit. ‘The Negro (Moor) has done his job, the Negro (Moor) can go’ (used ironically, when someone who has done something for somebody else meets with ingratitude, is unappreciated and no longer needed11). Documentary literature also makes use of the link between the concepts of NIEWOLNIK and BLACK PERSON, which is illustrated by the following passage about the situation in Eastern Africa at the end of the 19th century, when slavery had officially been abolished but was still being practiced. A Polish traveler reports with great indignation:

On a visit to the part of the city [Zanzibar] inhabited by Negroes, it will not even cross your mind, when you see all those people, equally black, equally naked, living in equally poor houses, that one of them is the owner and another is a thing, one has all the rights and another has none. But it actually is so – Negroes own their Negroes, too, slaves own their slaves – and all of them find the relationship as natural as the fact that one person is stronger and another is weaker, one is tall and another is short. (Sienkiewicz, 1956 [1890], p. 86; trans. A.W., emphasis added)

The wordplay Negroes own their Negroes, too, slaves own their slaves is based on two polysemous lexemes: niewolnik ‘slave,’ metonymically ‘a black person,’ and Murzyn ‘Negro,’ also metonymically ‘a slave.’ This is another confirmation of the fact that niewolnik is commonly associated with Africans in the colonial period.

10 Consider the following example: “What is white that a black man should have? – His master.” The joke, based on the conceptual connection between ‘being black’ and ‘being a slave,’ contains a wordplay on the antonyms black–white and the relational antonyms master–slave. 11 The source of this proverb is Friedrich Schiller’s Fiesco: Der Mohr hat seine Schuldigkeit getan, der Mohr kann gehen (Markiewicz & Romanowski, 1990, p. 578).

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2.2 Ancient times

A representative ancient, pre-Christian figure of a slave, whose image has been preserved in Polish culture, is Spartacus. The image is, however, rather inconspicuously manifested in the Polish lexicon: its only trace is the derived noun spartakiada ‘a kind of sports competition’ (SWO, 1980, p. 694; SMTK, 1997, p. 1092). The noun, however, is a Russian borrowing and is not listed in the dictionary of Polish eponyms (SEWO, 2006). Nevertheless, the image of Spartacus the gladiator and the leader of slave uprising is preserved in literary works, such as Cyprian Kamil Norwid’s12 poem Spaktakus, or Halina Rudnicka’s novel Uczniowie Spartakusa (“The Disciples of Spartacus”, 1951), for a few decades compulsory school reading. In the 1930s, there was also an organization of young Polish socialists called Spartakus, named so to reflect their rebellious tendencies. This image of Spartacus can serve as common ground in literary communication, as illustrated by the following passage from Ryszard Kapuściński’s Gdyby cała Afryka... (“If the Whole of Africa...”):

Also in the Algerian Sahara there had been, until recently, the biggest slave market in the world. Ben Bella closed this market and gave out to slaves the land and the date palms that had belonged to slave traders. Today In Salah has the world’s only dictatorship of slaves, formerly called “harratin” (pack animals). This way Ben Bella made Spartacus’ dream come true. (Kapuściński, 2011 [1969], p. 198; trans. and emphasis A.W.)

The association of slavery with antiquity also finds its confirmation in classical texts, cited by lexicographers.13 As an example, consider a passage from an important counter-reformation text by Piotr Skarga, Kazania sejmowe (“Sermons to the Parliament”): “Old Christians, who, during pagan times, had bought their slaves, gave freedom to all of them, as brothers in Christ” (SJPLin, 1807-1814; SJPZdan, 1861; SJPWar, 1900-1927). It is clear that in Skarga’s view, slavery and Christianity contradict each other.

2.3 Non-Christian cultures

The view that Christianity excludes slavery seems characteristic of Polish culture. It was implied in the political speeches of the Enlightenment opposing personal

12 One of the most outstanding Polish Romantic poets (1821-1883). 13 They can be found mostly in dictionaries from the 19th and the first half of the 20th century, as a result of the then-practiced tradition of finding illustrative examples.

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serfdom of peasants, and in the 19th-century works of Henryk Sienkiewicz: not only in Quo Vadis, but also in his African reports, where paganism and Islam were blamed for slavery:

Sulimue, who carries my rifles, has the flaw of being afraid ofus. Especially at the beginning, when I beckoned for a rifle, he ran to me with noticeable anxiety. He must have been a slave of an Arab in childhood, and his docility probably dates from those times. (Sienkiewicz, 1956 [1890], p. 201; trans. and emphasis A. W.)

Niewolnictwo ‘slavery’ is also associated with another Islamic culture: the Ottoman Empire and its tributaries. Jasyr, i.e. being held captive by Tatars and Turks, became the fate of many Polish gentry and peasants. The practice lasted from the Middle Ages until the 17th century.14 Other words in the same field are Arabic loanwords haracz ‘ransom or tribute’15 and harem.16 The last concept is connected with sexual slavery, and the motif of Polish women kidnapped into Turkish and Arab harems has appeared in Polish literature at least since the Renaissance.17 References to these aspects of Polish history can be found in the illustrative parts of the lexicographic entries for niewolnik and niewola:

So said black slaves [niewolnicy], the infidel guardians of their masters’ harems. (SJPLin, 1807-1814; SJPZdan, 1861; SJPWar, 1900-1927)

The slavery [niewola] under the Turk is not as hard as in our painted freedom,18 I would pay the haracz [ransom] and be free, and safe with my property. (SJPLin, 1807-1814; SJPZdan, 1861; SJPWar, 1900-1927)

14 “Beginning in the Middle Ages, Poland was being invaded by the warriors of Islam – Tatars, and since the 15th century, the country also had to struggle against the aggressive Ottoman Turkey. […] There were continuous forays of Crimean Tatars and other hordes (dependent on the Sultan) into the territory of the Republic. They left ashes and deserted land behind them. Thousands of people taken in jasyr were sold into slavery in oriental markets.” (Żygulski, 1994, p. 1, see also Jasiński, 1988). The word jasyr probably derives from esir or yesir, the Turkish names for a slave market (cf. the entry at http://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_Ottoman_Empire; accessed Jan 15, 2013). 15 Today the noun is more often used in the sense of ‘protection money.’ 16 Possibly, also the word eunuch ‘castrated human male,’ a loanword from Greek also meaning ‘harem guard.’ 17 Cf. the following excerpt from Jan Kochanowski’s 16th-c. poem “The Song about the Ravage of Podole”: “Daughters of gentry (God Almighty!) / are making the ugly beds of infidel dogs” (translated by A.W. from Kochanowski, 1970). 18 It is an ironic allusion to the idea of Polish “golden freedom” for the gentry, which by some was considered anarchy.

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To sum up, the association of niewolnik with unbelievers in general and with the culture of Islam in particular finds its confirmation in Polish lexis and textual data from various periods.

3. What niewolnik does and what happens to him (in the light of linguistic data)

An important semantic component of the lexeme niewolnik is ‘working for the owner.’19 It is found in such collocations as niewolnicza praca ‘slave labor’ and niewolnicza siła robocza ‘slave workforce,’ as well as in the many lexicalized metaphors of Murzyn ‘Negro,’ mentioned above. Another association is that of the low quality of slave work, preserved in the proverb Z niewolnika nie będzie robotnika ‘A slave will not make a good worker.’ The proverb, however, provides no explanation why this is so: a slave could be lazy, unmotivated, or could purposely sabotage his/her job. This last interpretation would correspond with the linguistic and cultural image of the mentality of a slave, discussed below. A slave is also pictured in the Polish language as an object of trade, cf. the following collocations: handel niewolnikami ‘slave trade,’ handel żywym towarem ‘human trafficking,’ zaprzedać w niewolę ‘to sell into slavery,’ wykupić z niewoli ‘to buy out of slavery,’ zapłacić haracz ‘to pay ransom.’ The association is also confirmed in racist jokes about Murzyn: Nie mam nic przeciwko Murzynom – jednego to bym nawet sobie kupił ‘I have nothing against Negroes; I would even buy one for myself.’ The verb kupić ‘buy’ serves here as a script switch trigger (Victor Raskin, from Mandler, 1984), actualizing the script of slave trade, which functions as cultural common ground. Niewolnik is also associated with piętnowanie ‘body-marking, branding,’ which is confirmed by a sentence illustrating the use of the noun in dictionaries:

Her Ladyship would like to have a branded slave [piętnowany niewolnik] in him, so that he would drink out of her shoes and collect dust from her footprints. (SJPLin, 1807-1814; SJPZdan, 1861; SJPWar, 1900-1927; SJPDor, 1958-1969; trans. and emphasis A.W.)

19 It is not mentioned in all of the dictionaries that I have consulted, but the shape of the entries is a matter of lexicographic convention rather than a sign of specific semantic processes. Lexicographers in the 19th and the early 20th century (SJPLin, SJPWar) focused on the idea of independence. In contrast, after World War II, with communism as the mainstream ideology, the key category was work, and this can also be observed in dictionary entries.

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In this citation from the work of Franciszek Zabłocki, one of the best known Polish comedy writers and satirists of the Enlightenment, the word piętnowany (past participle of piętnować) appears in its literal sense, but in today’s Polish it is mostly used in its metaphorical meaning ‘stigmatized.’

4. The physical and emotional condition of a slave

Niewola is intersubjectively associated with physical and mental suffering, which is reflected in the collocations jęczeć w niewoli ‘groan in slavery,’ niewola żelazna ‘iron slavery’ (contrasted with złota wolność ‘golden freedom’;20 niewola gniecie ‘slavery weighs (someone) down,’ as well as in phrases niewola ciężka dola ‘slavery – a heavy fate,’ niewola nie raj ‘slavery is not paradise’ (NKPKrzyż, 1962-1974; SPOJ, 2004). The concept of a suffering slave is also presupposed in texts cited by lexicographers:

… be he a white or a black slave, whether he groans [jęczy] under the violence of an unjust law or under his chains, he is a human being and does not differ from us in any respect. (Kołłątaj, 1952 [1789], trans. A.W.)

The image of a bounded, suffering slave is a basis for metaphors of love. For example, in the popular expression być w niewoli miłości (lit. ‘be in the slavery of love’) and in love poems, it highlights the paradox of the emotion, which accommodates the opposing qualities of joy and pain:

Nic mię nie boli, a płaczę, rzewliwy, I feel no pain and yet I cry, Nikt mnie nie więzi, a przeciem No one holds me captive and yet I yearn… tęskliwy… (Hieronim Morsztyn (16th-17th c.), Lamentation of a slave; trans. A.W.)

20 The adjective żelazny ‘iron, made of iron’ is here a metonymy for kajdany ‘irons’ or okowy ‘fetters, shackles.’ The latter words, designating physical objects that serve to restrict a person’s physical freedom, are in turn metonymically, but also metaphorically related to niewola. The metaphor is motivated by the features ‘hard,’ ‘heavy,’ and ‘difficult to break,’ associated with kajdany and okowy. Therefore, the expression niewola żelazna has the qualitative aspect of being a source of suffering that is difficult to change. Linguistic intuition suggests that kajdany i okowy are more strongly associated with więzień ‘prisoner’ than with niewolnik ‘slave,’ but the association with the latter transpires through the saying Nie ma większego okrutnika jak niewolnik rozkuty ‘There is no bigger tormentor than an unchained slave’ (NKPKrzyż, 1962-1974; SPOJ, 2004) – I will return to its semantic content presently.

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Pierwszy raz jam niewolnik rad z swojej For the first time I am a slave, glad of niewoli… my slavery… (Adam Mickiewicz (1826), Sonnet XIII of the “Odessa Sonnets” cycle; trans. A.W.)

It is also part of common knowledge that slavery not only brings suffering, but also degrades human beings, equating them with animals, cf. jarzmo niewoli ‘the yoke of slavery.’

5. The mentality of niewolnik

Niewolnik also connotes ‘submissiveness’ and ‘obsequiousness,’ which is revealed in the metaphorical use of the adjective and the adverb derived from the noun: niewolniczy ‘submissive, servile’ and niewolniczość w zachowaniu ‘servile behavior’ (SWJP, 1996). Such an attitude is obviously a consequence of the fear of the master’s rage, so it could be combined with hidden hate, which is expressed in the proverbs Niewolnik rzadko szczery ‘A slave is seldom sincere,’ Ilu niewolników, tylu nieprzyjaciół ‘So many slaves, so many enemies,’21 Każdy niewolnik jest ukrytym wrogiem ‘Every slave is a hidden enemy,’ Nie ma większego okrutnika jak niewolnik rozkuty ‘There is no bigger tormentor than an unchained slave’ (NKPKrzyż, 1962-1974; SPOJ, 2004). The commonly acknowledged belief that a slave is dangerous for his master was often used in the argumentation of ideologists of the Polish Enlightenment, who acted against personal serfdom of peasants, often portraying them as slaves:

[…] a fetus whose father is oppression and whose mother is slavery, must exceed in venom and severity anything predatory and killing we could imagine… (Kołłątaj, 1952 [1789], p. 165; trans. and emphasis A.W.)

The rebellious tendencies of slaves are personified by Spartacus (see section 2.2 above). This context readily brings to mind a fragment of Adam Mickiewicz’s poem Konrad Wallenrod, very important for Polish discourse on political and national independence:

21 The proverb has its origins in antiquity. It comes from the Latin Quot servi, tot hostes and has counterparts in many European languages (SPOJ, 2004, p. 169).

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Tyś niewolnik, jedyna broń You are a slave, and slaves’ only niewolników – podstępy. weapon is deception. (Mickiewicz, 1828, trans. A.W.)

Niewolnik refers here to a member of a nation invaded and dominated by a foreign state. The image of slaves who conspire and finally rise up is a literary theme characteristic of the discourse on 19th-c. Poland; it appears in Leopold Staff’s poem from 1918, the year of a regained sovereignty:

Polsko, nie jesteś ty już niewolnicą, Poland, you are no longer a slave; Łańcuch twych kajdan stał się tym the chain of your irons has become łańcuchem, the chain Na którym z lochu, co był twą stolicą on which you, with your own spirit, Lat sto, swym własnym dźwignęłaś się have raised out from a dungeon duchem. that was your capital for a hundred years. (Leopold Staff, Poland, you are no longer a slave,1918; trans. by A.W. from Staff, 1955, emphasis added)

In the poem, we can observe a significant interference of the concepts of SLAVE (expressed by niewolnica ‘female slave’) and PRISONER (implied by the noun loch ‘dungeon’). Both concepts are linked by the differential semantic component ‘lack of freedom’ and by the connotation of ‘suffering.’ It is interesting that being thrown into a dungeon and bound with chains (cf. kajdany ‘irons’ and łańcuch ‘chain’) is associated with being a prisoner rather than with being a slave. The vagueness may result from the fact that niewolnictwo ‘slavery,’ in the strict sense, evokes a rather alien and abstract concept for Polish speakers. Hidden hate and rebellious tendencies are not the only components of the image of a slave’s mentality. In linguistic data, we can also find evidence of the reverse conceptualization: that of an internal inclination toward submissiveness and passiveness, both physical and intellectual. To some extent, these features of niewolnik are confirmed by the collocations niewolnicze naśladownictwo ‘slavish imitation,’ niewolniczy przekład ‘slavish translation,’ niewolnik/niewolnica mody ‘a fashion slave’ – these are derogatory terms referring to situations when someone makes no use of their own judgment. Consider also the proverb Niewola dowcip zatłumia ‘Slavery suppresses intelligence’ and a corresponding quotation: Niewola myśl w człowieku tłumi, niszczy, gasi ‘Human thought is suppressed, destroyed, extinguished by slavery’ (NKPKrzyż, 1962-1974). The clearest expression of this idea, however, is the phrase zniewolony umysł ‘the captive mind’ (lit. ‘the enslaved mind’), now a conventionalized metaphor, created by Czesław Milosz (for the title of his 1953 non-fiction book). The idea of captive minds is presupposed in the following texts:

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You have changed the human nature in your brother! You have turned the slave, who could be useful for the country, into a useless machine. And so the slavish machine, totally deprived of will and reason, won’t take a step, unless it is forced to. (Stanisław Staszic’s political speech on peasants, 1790, trans. by A.W. from Staszic, 2003, p. 179)

[...] [...] Jest rzeka na wpół lodami przykryta There is a river, half-covered with ice I niewolnicze na brzegach pochody, and slavish processions on its banks, Nad siną chmurą, ponad czarne wody above a livid cloud, over the black waters, W czerwonym słońcu, błysk bata. a whip flashes in red sunlight.

Tam, w tym pochodzie, w milczącym Look, in the procession, in the row of silent szeregu, people, marches your son, his cheek cut, Patrz, to twój syn. Policzek przecięty, bleeding. He walks on, with a monkey Krwawi. On idzie, małpio uśmiechnięty, smile. Krzycz! W niewolnictwie szczęśliwy. Scream! Happy in slavery. […] [...] I mija tak człowiek, i już zapomina, And so one passes by, and forgets O co miał walczyć i po co. what he was to fight for and why. [...] [...] (Milosz, Walc (“The Waltz”), trans. by A.W. from Miłosz, 1942, emphasis added)

These reflections are revisited in The Captive Mind (1953), a philosophical and political essay about the situation in Poland during World War II and in the era of Stalinism, in which Milosz strongly criticizes the attitude of intellectual submissiveness and passiveness, as when members of a community succumb to being unable to think and decide for themselves.

6. Final word

As a result of the present reconnaissance of lexical and textual data, we have arrived at a sketchy, panchronic22 picture of the concept of NIEWOLNIK. Some of

22 I use the term panchronic in the belief that in studies of the relationship between language, culture, and cognition, the postulate of disjunctive treatment of synchronic states of the language and the processes of its evolution cannot be maintained. This is so for two reasons, connected with two research commitments: “cultural” and “cognitive.” The first reason is the need to take into account “the heritage of the past in the present” (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 10), to take note of the continuity of culture. The second reason is the nature of cognitive processes, reflected in linguistic structures and actualized with the participation of language: at play here is the dynamic nature and “radical vagueness” of linguistic categorization over time (Łozowski, 1999, 2000).

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its components are probably widespread in European culture, in particular the associations with the black race and the colonial era or ancient times, human trafficking, forced labor, sexual exploitation of women, suffering as a result of ill- treatment, and submissiveness combined with hidden hate. Other features seem to be rather specific to Polish language and culture, for example, the belief in the inalienable conflict between Christianity and slavery, the association between slavery and Muslim culture (Tatars and Turks in particular), perhaps even the idea of “the captive mind.” A corroboration of this view, however, requires further comparative research.

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References

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Bartmiński, Jerzy. (1986). Czym zajmuje się etnolingwistyka? Akcent, 4 (26), 16-22.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (1998). Podstawy lingwistycznych badań nad stereotypem – na przykładzie stereotypu „matki.” In Janusz Anusiewicz & Jerzy Bartmiński (Eds.), Język a Kultura, vol. 12. Stereotyp jako przedmiot lingwistyki. Teoria, metodologia, analizy empiryczne (pp. 63-83). Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (2006). Niektóre problemy i pojęcia etnolingwistyki lubelskiej. Etnolingwistyka, 18, 77-90.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (2009/2012). Aspects of Cognitive Ethnolinguistics. Ed. Jörg Zinken. Sheffield and Oakville, CT: Equinox.

Bartmiński, Jerzy, & Tokarski, Ryszard. (1993). Definicja semantyczna: czego i dla kogo? In Jerzy Bartmiński (Ed.), O definicjach i definiowaniu (pp. 47-59). Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Boryś, Wiesław. (2005). Słownik etymologiczny języka polskiego. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Literackie.

DSS. (2004). Dystynktywny słownik synonimów. Ed. Hanna Burkhardt, Alicja Nagórko, & Marek Łaziński. Kraków: Universitas.

Głowiński, Michał. (1986). Wartościowanie w badaniach literackich a język potoczny. In Stefan Sawicki & Władysław Panas (Eds.), O wartościowaniu w badaniach literackich (pp. 179-195). Lublin: TN KUL.

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Jasiński, Tomasz. (1988). Przerwany hejnał. Warszawa: Krajowa Agencja Wydawnicza.

Kapuściński, Ryszard. (2002 [1998]). The Shadow of the Sun. London: Penguin Books.

Kapuściński, Ryszard. (2011 [1969]). Gdyby cała Afryka... Warszawa: Agora.

Kochanowski, Jan. (1970). Pieśni. Wrocław: Ossolineum.

Kołłątaj, Hugo. (1952 [1789]). Do Prześwietnej Deputacyi… In Hugo Kołłątaj, Wybór pism politycznych. Wrocław: Ossolineum.

Łozowski, Przemysław. (1999). Panchrony of linguistics without sunchrony. In Barabara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (Ed.), Cognitive Perspectives on Language (pp. 23-36). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.

Łozowski, Przemysław. (2000). Vagueness in Language. From Truth-Conditional Synonymy to un-Conditional Polysemy. Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Mandler, Jean Matter. (1984). Stories, Scripts, and Scenes: Aspects of Schema Theory. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Markiewicz, Henryk, & Romanowski, Andrzej. (1990). Skrzydlate słowa. Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy.

Mickiewicz, Adam. (1826). Sonety. Moscow.

Mickiewicz, Adam. (1928). Konrad Wallenrod. Petersburg: Karol Kray.

Miłosz, Czesław. (1953). The Captive Mind. Tans. Jane Zielonko. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

NKPKrzyż. (1962-1974). Nowa księga przysłów i wyrażeń przysłowiowych polskich Ed. Julian Krzyżanowski. Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy.

Oxford Dictionaries. (2013). http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/ slave?q=slave [last accessed Feb 21, 2013]

Pajdzińska, Anna. (2004). Językowy obraz świata: problemy narracyjnej tożsamości. In Włodzimierz Bolecki & Ryszard Nycz (Eds.), Narracja i tożsamość (I), Narracje w kulturze (pp. 112-127). Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IBL.

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Pajdzińska, Anna, & Tokarski, Ryszard. (1996). Językowy obraz świata – konwencja i kreacja. Pamiętnik Literacki, 4, 143-158.

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SEWO. (2006). Słownik eponimów, czyli wyrazów odimiennych. Ed. Władysław Kopaliński. Warszawa: PWN.

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SJPDor. (1958-1969). Słownik języka polskiego. Vol. 1-10. Ed. Witold Doroszewski. Warszawa: Wiedza Powszechna.

SJPLin. (1807-1814). Słownik języka polskiego. Ed. Samuel Bogumił Linde. Warszawa: Drukarnia XX Piiarów.

SJPWar. (1900-1927). Słownik języka polskiego. [The “Warsaw dictionary”] Ed. Jan Karłowicz, Adam Antoni Kryński, & Władysław Niedźwiedzki. Warszawa.

SJPZdan. (1861). Słownik języka polskiego. Ed. Aleksander Zdanowicz et al. Wilno: Maurycy Orgelbrand Publishing House.

SMTK. (1997). Słownik mitów i tradycji kultury. Ed. Władysław Kopaliński. Warszawa: PiW.

SPOJ. (2004). Słownik przysłów w ośmiu językach. Ed. Dobrosława Świerczyńska & Andrzej Świerczyński. Warszawa: PWN.

SWB. (1995). Słownik wyrazów bliskoznacznych. Ed. Stanisław Skorupka. Warszawa: Wiedza Powszechna.

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Staszic, Stanisław. (2003). Przestrogi dla Polski. Wrocław: Ossolineum.

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Wierzbicka, Anna. (1992). Semantics, Culture and Cognition: Universal Human Concepts in Culture-Specific Configurations. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Chapter 16 The linguistic view of patriotism in selected Polish political commentaries

Małgorzata Brzozowska UMCS, Lublin, Poland 1. Patriotism in the Polish lexis and in questionnaires

Patriotyzm ‘patriotism’ occupies the twenty-second position in the hierarchy of Polish key words proposed by Walery Pisarek (Pisarek, 2002, p. 31). It has been a subject of interest for sociologists and politicians;1 it is also one of the main components of ideology. The concept appears often in public discourse,2 e.g. in statements of the Polish president Bronisław Komorowski,3 cf. also Levitz (2008) or Wojewódzki (2012). Patriotyzm also found its place on the list of value terms identified through the use of ASA/ADQ (Ankieta Słownika Aksjologicznego/Axiological Dictionary Questionnaire), a questionnaire conducted by Jerzy Bartmiński et al. in 1990, 2000, and 2010 among students at five Polish universities. Therefore,patriotyzm occupies an important place in the Polish linguistic worldview, the latter being understood as a:

… linguistic, variously verbalized interpretation of reality, expressed in the form of judgments about the world. The judgments may be “entrenched” in the very matter of language, i.e. its grammar, vocabulary, stereotyped texts (e.g. proverbs), or presupposed, i.e. implied by linguistic forms but entrenched on the level of social knowledge, beliefs, myths and rituals. (Bartmiński, 2006, p. 12)

1 Literature on the subject is rich; some of the more important publications are Lipski (1981), Karolak (1993), or Walicki (2009 [1990]). 2 According to van Dijk (2002), “if we focus on politicians, we shall usually have at least two ideologies as expressed in their text and talk: First professional ideologies that underlie their functioning as politicians. And second, the socio-political ideologies they adhere to, e.g., as members of political parties or social groups.” [quoted from www.discourses.org/ download/articles/; accessed Jan 25, 2013] 3 www.t.prezydent.pl/download/gfx/prezydent/pl/defaultopisy/.../publikacja5.pdf [accessed Aug 5, 2011]

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Naive linguistic worldview is an element of cultural common ground (CCG). This concept was introduced by van Dijk (2002) and is used, among others, by Bartmiński & Żuk (2009), in the sense related to the concept of cultural common knowledge (CCK) (Suk-Young Chwe, 1996, 2001). CCG is unquestionable, reasonable, and non-ideological, and forms the basis of all cultural knowledge. The word patriotyzm is etymologically related to the Latin pater ‘father’ and patria ‘fatherland’ and denotes ‘love of one’s homeland’ (NSEJP, 2003: 378). Nationalism, chauvinism, internationalism, cosmopolitism, and universalism can all be found in the lexical-semantic field of patriotism (cf. Brzozowska, 2011). Patriotism is defined in dictionaries as love of one’s homeland, manifested through devotion to one’s country and readiness to defend it, sometimes through the love of its past and traditions (SJPDor, 1958-1969) as well as through hard work (SWJP, 1998). It is a term that denotes a feeling and an attitude, the latter being defined in social psychology as a favorable or an unfavorable feeling towards particular people, objects, events, or ideas (Kenrick, Neuberg, & Cialdini, 1999). In many contexts attitudes and feelings become synonymous, since the essence of attitude is believed to reside in an emotional stance towards people, objects, etc. According to Nowakowska-Kempna (1987, pp. 116-117), the names of feelings-attitudes can be regarded as predicates that lead to three arguments: the subject that experiences a feeling, the object of the feeling, and cause-effect. Anna Wierzbicka defines love as “a desire to do something good to somebody else” (Wierzbicka, 1999, p. 53). In the light of these approaches and definitions, three argument roles associated with patriotyzm can be distinguished (Evans, 2009, p. 131): the Agent experiencing the feeling, the Object of the feeling, and Completion, i.e. the procendi/faciendi modus, which describes the way in which the object is dealt with (Wierzbicka’s “doing something to the object”). In ideologized dictionaries, such as Szymczak’s SJPSzym (1978), patriotism is defined as “a socio-political stance and a form of ideology, which combines devotion to one’s homeland, a sense of social bonds and devotion to one’s nation together with respect for other nations and their sovereign rights,” whereas the more recent dictionaries define it as a feeling, e.g. “love of one’s own country, combined with readiness to sacrifice one’s life for it” ISJP ( , 2000). Most of the dictionaries published after World War II distinguish a distinct form of patriotism called patriotyzm lokalny ‘local patriotism’ (“devotion to a place or a region one comes from or one is related to,” SJPSzym, 1978) or patriotyzm regionalny ‘regional patriotism’ (“local patriotism entails a strong devotion to the place or the region one is related to, when local matters are treated as more important than national ones,” ISJP, 2000). Another example, patriotyzm zakładowy ‘workplace patriotism’ (SJPDor, 1958-1969), is devotion to one’s workplace. Only Linde’s SJPLin (1807- 1814) defines patriotism as “a sense of citizenship.”

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Generally, love of one’s homeland is an expression of (and not only a synonym for) patriotism. It is usually understood as a devotion to one’s homeland, love of its past and traditions, and finally (as defined by the post-war dictionaries) readiness to defend the homeland even if it entails making the ultimate sacrifice. Less frequently, patriotism is defined as a devotion to one’s nation and a feeling of being bonded with it (in the dictionaries published after World War II, except SWJP, 1998 and ISJP, 2000), some define it as readiness to make sacrifices for one’s nation, others (SJPSzym, 1978 and PSJPZgół, 2000) highlight respect for other nations and their sovereign rights. SWJP (1998) allows for hard work to be an example of patriotism. Examples of shaping the patriotic attitude can also be found in phraseology. One can rozpłomienić ‘inflame’ (SJPDor), budzić ‘arouse,’ rozpalać ‘stir up,’ krzewić ‘propagate’ (SJPSzym, PSJPZgół, USJP), or uczyć ‘teach’ patriotism and wychowywać kogoś w poczuciu patriotyzmu ‘educate someone in patriotic spirit’ (PSJPZgół). Patriotism is also a duty: obowiązki patriotyczne ‘patriotic duties’ (Skorupka’s SFJP, 1985). Patriotyzm in post-war dictionaries is a feeling that is szczery ‘sincere,’ autentyczny ‘authentic,’ gorący ‘warm,’ najgorętszy ‘the warmest,’ głęboki ‘deep,’ or żarliwy ‘fervent.’ It may also be prawdziwy ‘true’ (SJPSzym, SWJP, PSJPZgół), often przesadny ‘exaggerated’ (PSJPZgół) or fałszywy ‘insincere,’ powierzchowny ‘superficial,’ (PSJPZgół). It is then called pseudopatriotyzm ‘pseudo-patriotism,’ antypatriotyzm ‘anti-patriotism,’ or hurapatriotyzm/hurrapatriotyzm ‘hooray- patriotism’ (PSJPZgół). It may manifest itself in art and be the theme of songs, poetry, literature, cf. the expression twórczość patriotyczna ‘patriotic works of art and literature’ (SFJP). Patriotism in dictionaries is thus portrayed as a feeling or an attitude of human, patriotic love of one’s homeland. The Polish language contains few derivatives of patriotism. These are: patriota ‘patriot-MASC’ and patriotka ‘patriot-FEM,’ patriotyczny ‘patriotic,’ patriotycznie ‘patriotically, in a patriotic way,’ and the aforementioned antonyms pseudopatriotyzm, antypatriotyzm, hurrapatriotyzm. The ASA/ADQ questionnaires conducted three times (1990, 2000, 2010) among students in the city of Lublin, Poland, show the stability of the linguistic view of patriotism as a feeling and an attitude that aims to secure and maintain the political freedom of one’s country; to a lesser extent it also focuses on work for the benefit of the country. The results of ASA/ADQ 19904 show that the most common features of patriotism at that time were love of/bond with/devotion to one’s homeland5

4 For a detailed analysis of the ASA/ADQ 1990 and 2000, see Brzozowska (2006). 5 In questionnaires and political commentaries, love of one’s homeland is not treated as a synonym of patriotism but as its characteristic.

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(22.3% of the cited data), sacrifice for one’s homeland (7.06%), working for one’s country (4.46%), allegiance to one’s country (3.35%), striving for the good of one’s country (3.35%), defending/fighting for one’s country (2.97%), commitment to (2.23%) and respect for it (1.86). Two general characteristics could be abstracted from these features: (i) the romantic-heroic attitude, which covers the love of the country, devotion to it, and the readiness to defend it; and (ii) the positivistic attitude, which involves – besides love, devotion, and readiness to defend – work for the good of the country, allegiance and respect. The ASA/ADQ 2000 questionnaire revealed that love/devotion/bond were still the most common features of patriotism (yet, they only covered 18.06% of the cited data), but sacrifice for the country (10.03%) and readiness to defend/ fight for it (8.70%) scored higher than in the 1990 questionnaire. The good of the country (4.01%) was also mentioned more frequently, whereas features such as working for the country (2.34%), devotion to the country (2.01%), and allegiance (1.67) scored lower. Some new features were also mentioned: traditions (2.01%), civic community, homesickness for the country, respect for national symbols, a sense of duty (each scoring 1.34%). One can see that the 2000 image of patriotism differs to some extent from its 1990 predecessor. Once again, the romantic attitude can be found here, with features such as sacrifice for the country and readiness to defend it (mentioned even more frequently), as well as the positivistic attitude (though mentioned less frequently). However, a new nostalgic-emigrant syndrome emerged in the wake of economic emigration: it covers love of one’s homeland, sacrifice, traditions, community, homesickness, and respect for national symbols. The ASA/ADQ 2010 questionnaire shows a still different view of patriotism. The most common descriptive feature was still the love of/devotion to one’s homeland (but only scoring 12.96% of the cited data), then dedication to one’s country (5.26%), and sacrifice (4.86%). The students also mentioned respect for the country (4.86%), respect for the national symbols, culture, and traditions (4.05%). Other features include: readiness to defend one’s country (3.64%), readiness to fight for it (2.83%), the country itself (2.83%), allegiance toit (2.43%), and the feeling of pride (because one belongs to the nation and the state, 2.02%). In three cases there was no response and in one case it was: “I don’t know; my generation does not know this concept” (1.62%). It is difficult to abstract away the general patterns involved in the 2010 view of patriotism. According to Lublin students, it is first and foremost understood in the traditional romantic and heroic way: they do not mention work for the country (previously, the positivistic attitude) or the feeling of homesickness (the nostalgic-emigrant syndrome), despite the continuing high rate of emigration. See Figure 16.1 for a diagrammatic breakdown of the questionnaire results. The respondents mentioned particular aspects of patriotism with variable frequencies in the three questionnaires, but these differences are not statistically significant.

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Fig. 16.1 Characteristics of patriotism in the ASA/ADQ 1990, 2000, and 2010 questionnaires. Aspects of patriotism marked by symbols along the horizontal axis: ? – no answer or “I don’t know”; A – psychosocial aspect; B – existential; E – ethical; F – physical; H – historical; I – ideological; K – cultural; P – psychological; R – religious; S – social; T – political; X – ethnic

It is mostly the romantic image of patriotism that is encoded in the cultural common ground: this is patriotism in the time of war and does not distinguish between “general” (national) patriotism and local one (listed in about half of the dictionaries). According to the questionnaires, positivistic patriotism becomes progressively less common. Apparently, although the young generation does want Poland to flourish, they do not associate economic and social growth with patriotism. Jerzy Bartmiński (2010) claims that as the idea of the so-called “Fourth Polish Republic”6 was conceived, various types of linguistic discourses emerged, each of them being shaped along the lines of a certain ideology. These are: the left-wing discourse, the feminist discourse, the moderate liberal-democratic discourse, the radical liberal (anarchist) discourse, the liberal-Catholic discourse, and the national right-wing discourse. Each of them is a showcase for the ideological, political, social, and economic opinions and attitudes of the speaking subjects. The discourse types are identified along axiological lines. According to Bartmiński, behind each of the discourses there is “a particular speaking subject, i.e. social groups, political parties, institutions, and organizations that

6 A political slogan coined in 1997 and used by the right-wing circles in the 2005 parliamentary election. Its message is a need to radically reform the Third Polish Republic (1989 onwards), both morally and politically.

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represent that subject, along with specific newspapers and magazines used to propagandize their views” (2010, p. 19). In this study, I will limit my analysis to the view of contemporary patriotism in selected political commentary texts, i.e. in Tygodnik Powszechny (a weekly, the liberal-Catholic discourse), Gazeta Wyborcza (a daily) and Polityka (a weekly) (the moderate liberal-democratic discourse), and on the Internet left-wing platform lewica.pl. Because patriotism is a certain manifestation (or category) of love, I accept Anna Wierzbicka’s definition of love (see above) but in its reformulation by Nowakowska-Kempna (1995): “someone loves someone else, i.e. someone wants to do/does something (good) to someone (something) and it is somehow evaluated.” In patriotism, the object is one’s homeland (however understood) and the subject is the individual who experiences the emotion and who acts for the good of the homeland (again, however that good is conceptualized). The order in which the aspects of love are presented reflects their relative weight in a given discourse type.

2. Patriotism in the discourse of Tygodnik Powszechny

The word patriotyzm does not occur in Tygodnik Powszechny (TP) very frequently. OBJECT OF PATRIOTISM. The general assumption or “editorial attitude” in the weekly is that all people form a big family. The idea of “gradual” patriotism is promoted, of love and devotion to one’s country and homeland, but also to Europe or even the whole world. The ideas of Christian universalism come to the foreground: we are all brothers and sisters and have a common homeland, the world created by God. Patriotism, which usually concerns one’s homeland, country, and nation, may in the future extend onto the European community and transform into “European patriotism,” as was professed by Pope John Paul II. EXPRESSION OF PATRIOTISM. Patriotism may be pozytywny ‘positive,’ nowoczesny ‘modern,’ and radosny ‘joyful.’ Contemporary patriots must be noticeable:

[P]atriotism should not be only of a martyrological nature [...]. Our social actions and campaigns are aimed at showing people that there are numerous events that we should be proud of and celebrate. We would like to show that there are positive heroes in Poland. (Miłosz Hodun, TP, 11 May, 2010)

Nowadays, patriotism means serving the country and its people. It should not be opposed to the idea of “loving thy neighbor,” but should rather complement it:

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That is why tax evasion is not a matter of shrewdness, but is unethical behavior and a matter of conscience [...]. The love of homeland and the love of all the people are two different types of love that must complement, and not exclude, each other. (Rev. Michał Heller, TP, 2 March, 2010)

Patriotism is a feeling, and when it is exaggerated, it turns into nationalism. However, to “live” patriotism means to undertake actions and pay attention to their consequences:

Patriotism as such has no directions. It can be grand and lofty, it can be hideous. In the latter case, it is usually called nationalism, but that does not change the heart of the matter. Love of one’s country, readiness to make sacrifices are great in themselves, but their practical outcomes for us and for others are another issue. What is valued in Poland most are intentions and feeling, not their results. Take the Bar Confederation7 as an example. (Jerzy Szacki, TP, 27 April, 2010)

Patriotism should not be limited only to military efforts, it should also encompass respect for the society, its prominent figures included:

Our patriotism brings to mind military combat, a constant struggle for liberation, search for and creation of new enemies. We seem to miss its most important aspect: respect for the community, for the common good, for authority, but also for composers and artists, whose names we often drag through the mud. (Jacek Kasprzyk, TP, 3 September, 2008)

Furthermore, patriotism should express a desire for Poland to be appreciated in the world, for the deceased to be respected, and for the living to work for the country’s good.

I would like Poland to be appreciated in the world and I take my hat off to the dead body of the Polish President. Each Christmas Eve I pray together with my children for those who have laid down their lives for the country, and I teach them that a patriot is he who works

7 An association of the Polish szlachta (nobility, landed gentry), 1768-1772, that was formed to defend the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth against external forces (Russia), but also against the Polish king (Stanisław August Poniatowski) or attempts, from a group of political reformers, to limit the influence of magnates. The Confederation is viewed as either a patriotic uprising, the first in Polish history, or as an anti-patriotic and antagonistic regressive movement.

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hard. I don’t treat any of the newspapers as an oracle, and sometimes it makes me laugh, sometimes it makes me cry to see their deadly grip. I lit a candle at the Katyń Cross in Cracow for the remembrance of Jacek Kuroń,8 and I lit it recently when we prayed for the victims of the Smolensk catastrophe,9 and their political opponents. (Michał Bonowicz, TP, 11 May, 2010)

It is not martyrological patriotism, but rather the kind that aims to promote Poland’s internal development and its role in Europe and the world. EVALUATION OF PATRIOTISM. True patriotism is evaluated positively, treated with respect and dignity; patriots are held in high esteem and given as examples to others. According to Pope John Paul II, patriotism should be open to other nations but involve emotional closeness and dedication to one’s own nation:

John Paul II regarded a nation – as well as a family – as a natural form of community life. He always dissociated himself from chauvinism. His patriotism, in line with the 19th-century Romantic poets [...], was a patriotism of openness, dialogue, of national bonds, but also a patriotism of dignity, personal freedom, and one that acknowledged the rights of other nations. (Jarosław Gowin, TP, 17 April, 2007)

SUBJECT OF PATRIOTISM. Naturally and unquestionably, the subject of patriotic feelings is a human being (usually a Pole). In sum, Tygodnik Powszechny promotes patriotism as an attitude that serves the country and its nation, that involves respect for people, an attitude full of pride and joy, reflection on the past but without a martyrological component.

3. Patriotism in the discourse of Gazeta Wyborcza and Polityka

The discourse of the daily Gazeta Wyborcza (GW) and the weekly Polityka requires special attention. Two distinct but compatible versions

8 The Katyń massacre was the mass execution of around 22,000 Polish army officers, police officers, and intelligentsia, carried out in 1940 by the Soviet People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD). Jacek Kuroń (1934-2004) was a Polish dissident and one of the leaders of the opposition in the communist-run People’s Republic of Poland. 9 An airplane crash in Smolensk, Russian (April 10, 2010), with a deadly toll of nearly a hundred people, most of them statesmen and politicians, including the Polish president Lech Kaczyński and his wife.

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(or profiles10) of patriotism are promoted there, both of them identifiable in each title. In contrast to Tygodnik Powszechny, patriotism is a frequently occurring notion in both Gazeta Wyborcza and Polityka.

Profile I

OBJECT OF PATRIOTISM. The object of patriotism in Profile I is one’s “closest circle,” but extended, as in Tygodnik Powszechny, onto the whole of Europe and even the world. However, it results from a different outlook on life: people are born and live on Earth and this is their homeland. The idea shows a certain affinity to cosmopolitism:

Polish patriotism is tantamount to European patriotism. There is no Poland that is not a part of Europe. You cannot be a non-European Pole. But there is no European patriotism that would be devoid of national identity, just as there are no European lullabies. (Zbigniew Najder, GW, 22 May, 2010)

WAY OF EXPRESSION. Patriotism entails work so as to facilitate the growth of the country and reduce the political and economic gap between Poland and Western Europe:

In this new situation there is a need for civic, rational patriotism that would combine emotions with broader actions for the common good. In the center of its attention should be the community and solidarity of actions undertaken by those who identify themselves with a community that is greater than the historical and political one. These features of patriotism require citizens’ involvement for the sake of others and for the sake of mutual trust. (GW, 15 June, 2010)

Patriotism can also be expressed through respect for fellow-citizens, through cooperation and constructive arguments.

10 Profiling is a linguistic and conceptual operation, performed by the speaking subject, which “consists in shaping the picture of the object in terms of certain aspects [...] of that object: e.g. its origin, features, appearance, functions, experiences, events connected with them, etc., within a certain type of knowledge and in accordance with the requirements of a given viewpoint” (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, 89). A profile is in this understanding tantamount to “a variant of the image of a given object” (ibid., p. 91).

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Modern patriotism should be related to one’s community and should value responsibility for one’s actions and for the common good:

[P]atriotism is all about identifying oneself with the community, which also entails the feeling of shame. (GW, 1 June, 2010)

I would like to see a patriotism based on the common good, a patriotism that would exclude no one, that would be critical of history, yet respectful of one’s roots and tradition. (Jerzy Jedlicki, GW, 26 April 2010)

Patriotism should be based on common values cherished by a civic community (especially human rights, democracy, cross-cultural dialogue, tolerance, openness, dedication to other people), and should not be limited by political borders:

These days we do not need traditional patriotism very much, the patriotism that was supposed to shield us from external threats. Rather, we need a modern type of patriotism, the kind that would encourage us to be more open, more devoted to other people, to promote attitudes we value, and also to understand the differences. Today patriotic feelings need not be confined within the borders of our country, or to the crowned white eagle.11 The respect for human rights, democracy, multicultural dialogue, or a liberal discussion over our philosophical and religious roots, are universal values, not contradictory to patriotism but ones that Poles were not allowed to cultivate for several decades. (GW, 10 June, 2010)

New ideas pertaining to Polish patriotism include cooperation with Poland’s neighbors for the mutual benefit and constructive domestic arguments, especially on Polish history:

First of all, a patriotism of cooperation. [...] If we make progress, Poland will too. The concept of cooperation boils down to basic daily actions and decisions. Let’s do a test: let’s plan and realize something together with our neighbors. Something that may be more beneficial to them than to us. [...] Second of all, a patriotism of arguments. Constructive arguments, to be precise. It is not about quarrelling, so common in the public domain:

11 The Polish national emblem.

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about who is a better and a worse Pole, who is more righteous, who is a traitor. [...] The patriotism of arguments would be manifested as a discussion about opinions (although sometimes it would also concern fundamental principles). Examples are easy to find. A discussion on Polish history could be particularly beneficial, as history is the source of our [national] identity and views. A different model of teaching and thinking about history would be welcome. (GW, 4 June, 2010)

Similarly to the discourse of Tygodnik Powszechny, Gazeta Wyborcza also mentions sacrifice and devotion as aspects of patriotism:

For me, being a liberal patriot means involvement in the public life, for the sake of a modern, tolerant, open Poland, even at the expense of one’s own career. (Leszek Jażdżewski, the editor-in-chief of Liberté!, GW, 1 September, 2010)

EVALUATION OF PATRIOTISM. Patriotism is presented with respect and attention, often with other positive values. It is associated with the slogan “Patriotism is trendy” (GW, 2 May, 2011). SUBJECT OF PATRIOTISM. As in the case of Tygodnik Powszechny, the subject of patriotism is a human being.

Profile II

The other profile of patriotism presented in Gazeta Wyborcza is very different from what is found in the cultural common ground. On the one hand, the traditional, heroic form of patriotism is rejected:

... the hysterical and autodestructive model of Polish patriotism12 is obsolete now. It is not useful anymore. It does more harm than good. It may only be national martyrdom or a source of inspiration for eccentric poets, praising the glory of being executed. (Wojciech Maziarski, GW, 13 September, 2012)

On the other hand, patriotism is trivialized, the word is used in inappropriate contexts and generally abused.

12 The journalist refers here to “honorable suicide,” when further resistance against the enemy is futile and defeat is imminent.

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OBJECT OF PATRIOTISM. The object of patriotism is not only one’s homeland, but also something that particularly appeals to people, such as patriotyzm radiowy ‘radio patriotism’ (a liking for a particular radio station), patriotyzm stadionowy ‘stadium patriotism’ (expressing support for a team or a sports club, often a local one), patriotyzm futbolowy ‘football patriotism’ (a more complex notion, sometimes tantamount to supporting a football team, but sometimes an expression of traditional patriotism through support for the Polish national football team), patriotyzm cmentarny ‘cemetery patriotism,’ patriotyzm nekrofilski ‘necrophilia patriotism’ (a liking for the past and one’s ancestors), patriotyzm zakupowy ‘shopping patriotism’ (being attached to a particular shop, or most often, a supermarket), patriotyzm bazarowy ‘market patriotism’ (shopping at the particular market), patriotyzm piwny ‘beer patriotism’ (drinking only a certain kind of beer). Sometimes also the scope of patriotism is delineated, e.g. economic patriotism etc. SUBJECT OF PATRIOTISM. The concept of patriotism does not appear only in ”traditional” contexts (e.g. the patriotism of citizens, freedom-fighters, of the Polish people, etc.) but also in the contexts such as patriotyzm bocianów ‘the patriotism of storks,’ orłów ‘of eagles,’ krokodyli ‘of crocodiles,’ and sikorek ‘of titmice’: the animals have a tendency to inhabit the same places (e.g. GW 22-23 August, 1998; GW Białystok 03-05 April, 1999). EVALUATION OF PATRIOTISM. Patriotism is evaluated positively but with no loftiness. Rather, it comes with a pinch of salt, a concept that is no longer “fresh” or attractive (Polityka, 31 January, 2009), or in the neologism patridiotyzm ‘patridiocy.’ Heroic patriotism is out of the question (cf. above).

4. Patriotism in the discourse of the Internet platform lewica.pl

Left-wing groups (www.lewica.pl, last accessed 13 October, 2011) view patriotism in a less traditional way. SUBJECT AND OBJECT OF PATRIOTISM. The right to patriotism is granted to all the citizens, regardless of the sex, also to minorities (especially sexual and ethnic minorities) living in Poland. Although neither Tygodnik Powszechny nor Gazeta Wyborcza discriminate against those groups, they do not stress their presence or role. The right to patriotism, according to lewica.pl, should not be appropriated by political parties. European patriotism is also possible but only as a result of mutual agreement (Leszek Żuliński, 13 April, 2007). WAYS OF EXPRESSION. Patriotism does not consist in consent to one’s exploitation or to labor that ruins one’s health (Grzegorz Ilnicki, 2 February, 2009). Above all, it entails working for the society instead of celebrating innumerable holidays:

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... patriotism is not what the right-wing parties make of it, i.e. empty celebration of independence holidays, patriotic ceremonies, etc. [...] [P]atriotism means first and foremost working for the benefit of the Polish society, including the work of a journalist (which I’m doing right now) and of a politician. (Maria Fołtyn, 23 November, 2008)

Patriotism is also a feeling of belonging; it involves cultivating traditions and being proud of them: Being a part of tradition and being proud of it are the foundations of an active participation in the world of ideas, in which the good ideas are a source of inspiration, rather than a tool of “purity” that excludes otherness. (Małgorzata Anna Maciejewska, 16 December, 2010)

Social patriotism should be based on common well-being (Piotr Szumlewicz, 13 November, 2013). These are not all the versions of patriotism in contemporary Polish. The others include the discourse of radical right-wing groups for which one’s homeland and traditional heroic patriotism are fundamental national values, the anarchistic discourse, in which patriotism is a thing of the past, and the feminist discourse, related in its tenor to anarchistic discourse.

5. Concluding remarks

To sum up, the Polish linguistic view of patriotism in selected political commentaries is diversified. Although all the types of discourse are based on the cultural common ground, each of them defines patriotism differently due to differences in political and ideological orientation. This is reflected in the cognitive structure and content of the concept (see the Appendix for more succinct versions of the explications). In the discourse of Tygodnik Powszechny, patriotism is people’s love of their homeland (place of birth, the whole world), love that is manifested through one’s readiness to defend the country and work for it: it is close to universalism. In the left-wing discourse its image is similar, with emphasis on everyone’s right to patriotism, regardless of their political views. In the discourse of Gazeta Wyborcza, patriotism is either love of the homeland understood as one’s country of origin or as Europe (expressed through readiness to defend and work for it), or as people’s devotion to their country (expressed through emotional attachment and a desire to return to the country). In this discourse type, the notion of patriotism shows signs of degradation and trivialization. In sum, the range of the concept of PATRIOTISM in the discourse of Polish political commentaries is extending and the concept itself is becoming progressively less clear-cut.

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References

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Bartmiński, Jerzy, & Żuk, Grzegorz. (2009). Pojęcie RÓWNOŚCI i jego profilowanie we współczesnym języku polskim. Etnolingwistyka, 21, 47-84.

Brzozowska, Małgorzata. (2006). O przebiegu badań nad zmianami w rozumieniu nazw wartości w latach 1990-2000. In Jerzy Bartmiński et al. (Eds.), Język – wartości – polityka. Zmiany rozmienia nazw wartości w okresie transformacji ustrojowej w Polsce. Raport z badań empirycznych (pp. 36-44). Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Brzozowska, Małgorzata. (2011). Profile patriotyzmu i pozostałych pojęć nazywających stosunek ludzi do państwa i narodu w dwóch typach polskiego dyskursu katolickiego (Tygodnik Powszechny i Nasz Dziennik). In Sławoj Szynkiewicz, Beata Walęciuk-Dejneka, & Tomasz Rokosz (Eds.), Konfrontacja i dialog w tekstach kultury polskiej (pp. 357-373). Siedlce: Uniwersytet Przyrodniczo-Humanistyczny.

Evans, Vyvyan. (2009). How Words Mean. Lexical Concepts, Cognitive Models, and Meaning Construction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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ISJP. (2000). Inny słownik języka polskiego. Ed. Mirosław Bańko. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN.

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Appendix Proposed explications of Polish PATRIOTYZM ‘patriotism’

PATRIOTISM IN CULTURAL COMMON GROUND SUPERORDINATE CATEGORY: feeling OBJECT OF PATRIOTISM: homeland, i.e. country of origin, also the so-called “little homeland,” the land where one was born, and often the people who inhabit it; in line with the etymology of the word patriotyzm, related to Latin patria ‘fatherland’ and pater ‘father’ SUBJECT: since it is a feeling, it can only be ascribed to people WAYS OF EXPRESSION: in the time of external threats, a patriot should fight for the safety and freedom of the country, and if needed, they should make the ultimate sacrifice; in the time of peace and stability, a patriot works for the country and its growth EVALUATION: clearly positive evaluation of both patriotism and patriotic persons

PATRIOTISM IN THE DISCOURSE OF TYGODNIK POWSZECHNY SUPERORDINATE CATEGORY: feeling OBJECT: homeland, i.e. country of origin, and the so-called “great homeland” (the whole world – gradable feeling) SUBJECT: since it is a feeling, it can only be ascribed to people EXPRESSION OF PATRIOTISM: in the time of external threats, a patriot should fight for the safety and freedom of the country, and if needed, they should make the ultimate sacrifice; in the time of peace and stability, a patriot works for the country and its growth, serves the country, respects it and is joyful for it EVALUATION: clearly positive evaluation, provided it is an open type of patriotism

PATRIOTISM IN THE DISCOURSE OF GAZETA WYBORCZA

Profile I SUPERORDINATE CATEGORY: feeling OBJECT: homeland, i.e. country of origin, and the so-called “great homeland” (Europe), this kind of patriotism is identical with European patriotism SUBJECT: since it is a feeling, it can only be ascribed to people EXPRESSION OF PATRIOTISM: in the time of external threats, a patriot should fight for the safety and freedom of the country, and if needed, they should make the ultimate sacrifice; in the time of peace and stability, patriotic persons should respect the country’s roots, cherish solidarity, conscientiousness,

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rationality, hard work, strive for the country’s growth in order to reduce the economic gap between Poland and Western Europe; they should be involved in public life EVALUATION: positive with the proviso that it cannot be closed to other countries and nations

Profile II SUPERORDINATE CATEGORY: feeling OBJECT: homeland, i.e. the country of origin, plus everything that people are emotionally attached to SUBJECT: it is ascribed to living creatures, i.e. people and animals (reptiles, amphibians, birds) that return to their place of birth and/or defend the place against strangers EXPRESSION OF PATRIOTISM: in the time of external threats, a patriot should fight for the safety and freedom of the country, and if needed, they should make the ultimate sacrifice; in the time of peace and stability, they return to their place of origin and work for its benefit EVALUATION: positive, sometimes ambivalent, overused

PATRIOTISM IN THE LEFT-WING DISCOURSE SUPERORDINATE CATEGORY: feeling SUBJECT: since it is a feeling, it can only be ascribed to people, with the proviso that the right to feel patriotic should not be appropriated OBJECT: homeland, i.e. the country of origin, and the so-called “little country,” the land where one was born (local patriotism) and sometimes the people who inhabit it; connected with the etymology of the word patriotyzm, from Latin patria ‘fatherland’ EXPRESSIONG OF PATRIOTISM: in the time of external threats, a patriot should fight for the safety and freedom of the country, and if needed, they should make the ultimate sacrifice; in the time of peace and stability, they should feel a part of the tradition and be proud of it, they should be actively involved in social life, work for the country, its growth and common well-being EVALUATION: clearly positive

Translated by Konrad Żyśko

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Part IV PROBLEMS AND QUESTIONS

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Chapter 17 A linguistic picture, image, or view of “Polish Cognitive Studies”

Elżbieta Tabakowska Jagiellonian University of Kraków, Poland

1. Introduction

“Polish Cognitive Studies” (PCS) is the name given a few years ago to what is alternately referred to as “The Lublin School of Ethnolinguistics”, a project originated and run by professor Jerzy Bartmiński. As documented by numerous publications (and notably the so called “red series of Lublin”) and scholarly meetings, the project has now developed into a full-fledged scholarly program, gathering linguists from many Polish academic centers and constantly gaining in significance. Although an alternative and at the same time a welcome complement to the “American and European Cognitive Linguistics” (A/ECL) of Ronald Langacker, George Lakoff, Gilles Fauconnier, Mark Turner, René Dirven, Günter Radden, Dirk Geeraerts and their collaborators and followers, the two schools have developed separately and almost independently. While the Polish scholars were in general well aware of the work of their American and European colleagues, achievements of Polish cognitivists, published mostly in Poland and in Polish, were largely unknown outside the country, due to the barrier created by the authors’ native tongue, the knowledge of which among non-native speakers is still officially considered by many educational institutions in English-speaking countries as an “exotic skill.” The 2009 (paperback 2012) publication of a representative selection of Jerzy Bartmiński’s most important works, expertly translated into English by one of his younger colleagues and carefully edited by another, brought into the picture a welcome touch of symmetry. The articles published in the 2009/2012 volume span a period of nearly 30 years, punctuating subsequent stages in what can legitimately been called the PCS tradition. The present essay is an attempt at a comparison – fairly cursory, considering both the limitations of space and the vast literature on the subject – of PCS with A/ ECL, ranging from key terminology to basic tenets of the two models of language and linguistic communication, to their actual and potential applications. It will focus on Bartmiński (2009/2012), which provides a comprehensive survey of the work done within the PCS framework over the last quarter of a century.

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2. Terms and definitions

The Lublin-based linguists, naturally, introduced – and used – their own Polish terminology. Their American (and non-American, but English-speaking) counterparts, also naturally, introduced – and used – their own English terms. Therefore, rendering Bartmiński’s texts into English was a challenging exercise in interlingual translation, with the two theories revealing in the process their mutual affiliations and particular discrepancies. It seems worthwhile to begin the comparison of the two models of language and usage by analyzing most fundamental notions, terms and definitions. While Langacker’s brand of cognitivism juxtaposes language – as means to express conceptualizations – with mind as the locus where the latter take shape, Bartmiński (and/or his translator) writes of “the relationship between language and the mentality of the people who speak it” (2009/2012, p. 11; emphasis E.T.). The authors’ use of the two words reveals a significant difference between the two approaches. While the former makes reference to mental abilities, the latter embraces a significantly wider scope, including also mental attitudes: mental states that condition people’s interpretations of things, relations, and events and which are significantly influenced by their beliefs and systems of values – in other words, by their culture. And it is the direct recognition of the role of culture that calls for the need to differentiate between “linguistic and cultural worldviews” (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 223) and, ultimately, to capture “the internal differentiation” between them (p. 89), as manifested in the approach of PCS researchers. On the other hand, in spite of Langacker’s postulate to complement the examination of linguistic structure by including “discourse, sociolinguistic, diachronic and ecological perspectives” (Langacker, 1991, p. 334), a claim that is now more than twenty years old, actual manifestations of this need in the work done in the “Langackerian” vein are still few and far in between. Another crucial difference involves the understanding of the notion of prototype, fundamental to both frameworks. The cultural turn as seen in cognitive ethnolinguistics means skewing the researchers’ stance towards a particular brand of prescriptivism: culture-sensitive prototypes (of lexical categories) tend to be idealized rather than objectively descriptive, or include what Bartmiński calls a “mythological element, i.e. an image of what should be (…) superimposed onto that of what is” (2009/2012, p. 139; emphasis in the original). In other words, in linguistic analyses, prototypes often become almost automatically replaced with stereotypes (with a resulting confusion in terminology and understanding). Misunderstandings can actually occur due to the use in both theories of yet another crucial term, i.e. profile. In Langacker’s terminology, profile refers to the entity that is designated by a particular semantic structure, which had been selected to function as the focus of a scene. As such, it receives a certain degree

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of prominence – a special type of what is defined as salience. Salience is the result of profiling, which means highlighting a given element within the overall matrix of a semantic structure. The PCS definition of profile, by contrast, reveals the socio-cultural grounding of the theory: it is “a particular configuration of linguistically entrenched judgements” (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 3). In consequence, the term covers a wider scope of cognitive structuring: it is defined as “underscoring some aspects and downplaying others”, i.e. “organizing them hierarchically within an assumed perspective of viewing” (p. 98). The affinity between both concepts can be seen by comparing discussions of certain standard, and now classic, examples given by proponents of both frameworks. For instance, Langacker’s famous roe as opposed to caviar is paralleled by Bartmiński’s illuminating discussion of alternate etymologies of the Polish noun źrenica ‘pupil (of the eye).’ In both theories, profiling involves the process of (semantic or/and pragmatic) focusing, which results in foregrounding. As in Langacker’s model (cf., e.g. 1987, pp. 124ff.; 2008, pp. 57ff.), in PCS, foregrounding involves selection and activation of some cognitive domains at the cost of other elements of the matrix, which become backgrounded; this results in relative degrees of activation of selected domains. Domains that are activated are central for particular conceptualizations while other domains become peripheral. Focusing is thus a matter of degree since it depends on individual contexts. Langacker describes focusing as being relative to “particular purposes, dimensions of structure, and levels of organization” (2008, p. 57); “the status of cultural practice”, admittedly one of the crucial aspects of the relativity, is only signaled by a few lexical examples (e.g. Langacker’s discussion of the lexeme lipstick, 2008, p. 57), and once again, cultural conditionings of cognitive, semantic and linguistic structuring remain mainly within the domain of theoretical claims and postulates. Langacker states, rather vaguely, that “how many domains we recognize, and which ones, depends on our purpose and to some extent is arbitrary” (p. 44). PCS, however, shifts the proportions, so that “cultural practice” is placed at the core of linguistic investigation. The shift is also seen in the understanding of Langacker’s notion of cognitive domain as opposed to PCS’s facet. While the former refers to “an area of conceptualization,” the latter is an aspect “in reference to the image of a given concept,” or a semantic subcategory, defined as “a bundle of judgments making up the explication and grouping the characteristics of the object” (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 90, emphasis E.T.). Finally, both frameworks emphasize the importance of the particular point of view taken by the conceptualizer while construing their conceptualization. While for Langacker point of view is once again defined by such parameters as mental transfer or the degree of subjectification as reflected in a linguistic structure, PCS considers viewpoint to be a function of perspective, shaped by the visual field of an individual, a social group, or a speech community.

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3. The key Notion: World View, World-View, Worldview, the View of the world, picture of the world, or image of the world?

In Polish, the label językowy obraz świata that represents the concept crucial to PCS is conventionally used to refer both to a particular theoretical framework and to practical manifestations of the general model. In English translations, this notion has many possible names. Apart from the iconic spelling that reflects varying degrees of the semantic merger of constituent notions (cf. the iconic principle of proximity as reflected in individual expressions, view of the world, world view, world-view, worldview), there is the lexical opposition between the meanings of the nouns view, image, and picture. The three notions seem to be fairly close in meaning, but if one takes the stance of cognitivist disbelief in synonymy seriously, one has to assume that choosing one over another will imply differences in an understanding of the underlying notion – both by the translator and by their prospective readers. It then seems justified to try and explain the respective implications of each term. In “pictures,” “images,” and “views”, the idea of observation is inherently combined with that of interpretation, resulting in what, within the framework of A/ECL, Leonard Talmy (1996) defines as ception, i.e. the merger of per- and con-ception. However, it is the proportion between the two that matters. The English word picture (Polish obraz) comes from the Latin noun pictura, a derivate of the verb pingere ‘to paint’. Although subject to numerous metaphorical extensions, it is primarily used to refer to representations that are objective and generalized, and therefore conventional, i.e. to reproductions. The noun image (Polish wizerunek), etymologically derived from the Latin noun imago and related to the verb imitari, has departed from its original meaning through semantic extension, and is today understood with reference to representations that are subjective, individual and non-conventional: i.e. to effects of subjective perception. Finally, English view (Polish wizja ‘vision,’ pogląd ‘view, opinion,’ or perspektywa ‘perspective’) comes from the Anglo-Norman verb vieue ‘to see’ and is today taken to refer to representations shaped by opinions, beliefs and general outlooks.1 The definition given in Bartmiński (2009/2012) justifies his translator’s use of the term linguistic worldview: it is “a language-entrenched interpretation of reality, which can be expressed in the form of judgements about the world, people, things or events. It is an interpretation, not a reflection”

1 For a broader discussion of the semantics and pragmatics of these terms, see Tabakowska (2005).

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(2009/2012, p. 23, emphasis E.T.). Bartmiński is fully aware (and so is his translator) of the opposition between the terms view/vision on the one hand and picture on the other: the former implies “the act of looking” and the presence of an observer by whom this act is performed, while the latter focuses on the object, i.e. that “which is contained in language itself” (2009/2012, p. 76). In general, the opposition corresponds to Langacker’s notion of subjectification and objectification (cf. below, section 4.1.). Compared with concepts used by other Polish authors, PCS focuses less on the linguistic structure itself than on its sociocultural aspects and conditionings. Thus, for instance, Pisarek talks about “picture of the world reflected in a given national language,” Grzegorczykowa defines the notion as “conceptual structure fossilized in the system of a given language,” while Tokarski postulates a “set of regularities in grammatical and lexical structures, manifesting various ways of perceiving the world” (after Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 24; emphasis E.T.). The other constitutive elements of the overall term also require (re)defining. To quote Bartmiński, each refers “to a different apex of the semiotic triangle: linguistic evokes words (meaningful and referring to objects), view evokes an image (concept or meaning), a subjective construct correlated with the word and the real-world object; world evokes reality, if only virtual” (2009/2012, p. 218). At some other place the author refers to what he calls “the other reality: in text, painting, cinema, television or on the computer screen” (p. 103). It is precisely this last constitutive element of the term that remains problematic: when defining the word view, Bartmiński talks about “the world” and “the real world objects”; the “world” is believed to evoke (virtual) reality. The ontological and epistemological difference between “the real world” and “the projected reality” on the one hand, and “possible” or “represented worlds” on the other seems crucial for the overall PCS framework, as does the opposition between physical-sensual and linguistic-cultural realities. Cognitive linguists’ dichotomy of real vs. virtual reality is less complex and more clear-cut, but only due to the marginal status of sociocultural factors. Lack of terminological – and notional – clarity results in what might give an impression of lack of consistency in the English translation of Bartmiński’s work. For instance, the Polish conception of the lexeme ojczyzna is referred to as “an ideological image” (2009/2012, p. 62), an attempt is made to “reconstruct the linguistic picture of dola” (p. 205), while elsewhere reference is made to “the picture of reality” (p. 81; emphasis E.T.). But it is not the aim of this essay to provide a critical assessment of the English translation of Bartmiński’s work. On the contrary – I fully appreciate the translator’s effort. Rare inconsistencies are unavoidably caused by the complex nature of the subject matter, and further complicated by what, in this case, the very subject matter actually is: sociocultural differences that are embodied in the two languages.

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4. Polish Cognitive Studies vs. American/ European Cognitive Linguistics2

4.1. Common ground

Among the areas of A/ECL and PCS overlap perhaps the most important is their treatment of diachronic and synchronic aspects of linguistic description. Both frameworks are based upon principles aptly summarized in the A/ECL slogan “synchrony in diachrony.” Indeed, both put forward the thesis that natural language becomes internally differentiated (diachrony) and at a given time is internally differentiated (synchrony) due to the influence of sociocultural factors. The classical structuralist postulate of drawing a distinct demarcation line to separate synchrony from diachrony is no longer adhered to, nor is the de Saussurean notion of the fundamental arbitrariness of linguistic structures. Motivation – per- and con-ceptual, individual and collective – is given the status of a basic mechanism underlying language creation and development. A/ECL assumes that, in diachronic change, signs that were first created as strongly motivated gradually become conventionalized and as a result might seem to be arbitrary. However, the fact that motivation behind a given linguistic sign cannot be revealed and demonstrated does not mean that there had never been any; the notion of “lost motivations” is generally accepted. PCS finds such (lost) motivations mainly in linguistic manifestations of folklore, while A/ECL looks for explanations in the workings of general mechanisms of human cognition. In consequence, both focus upon etymology, which plays an important role in the two frameworks. In both approaches, a dictionary entry of a lexical item ultimately takes the shape of a radial category with a category-central prototype and a number of peripheral culture-sensitive extensions. Another piece of common ground is the dichotomy between entities which A/ ECL defines as things and relations. For Langacker, this fundamental opposition, based on human cognizant perception of “what things are like in the world,” underlies the grammars of all natural languages. In PCS it likewise emerges as the opposition between “subject-related” and “object-related” conceptions of the world: the former implies a relation between an observer and the thing observed with the latter focusing upon the object of observation, i.e. the actual

2 Convergences and discrepancies between the two theories will be signaled without providing detailed description of relevant aspects of the two frameworks. Interested readers who might not feel familiar enough with particular tenets and notions are referred to the relevant literature.

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product of -ception (as in Talmy, 1996; cf. also Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 76 and section 3 above). The dichotomy corresponds to the phenomenon discussed by Langacker under the rubric of subjectification: the changing role of the observer and the object(s) of observation within an expression. Finally, the most general area of agreement includes all principles and assumptions that result from the inherently subjective nature of the processes of perception, conception, and expression. In A/ECL, this subjectivity is the function of particular cognitive parameters that constitute the overall viewing arrangement, while in PCS the arrangement is ultimately determined by sociocultural factors.

4.2. Discrepancies

The primary discrepancy concerns the status of morphology and syntax in the description of language. The fundamental A/ECL assumption whereby lexicon, morphology, and syntax comprise a continuum stands in opposition to PCS’s adherence to traditional taxonomies of grammatical categories. As a result of this, in the two frameworks the crucial notion of unit is understood differently. While in PCS a unit is defined in traditional terms, A/ECL gives the status to every cognitive structure that is entrenched strongly enough to be produced and processed by language users without paying attention to either its individual constitutive elements or their mutual arrangement. Such integrated wholes can be found on every level of the standard hierarchy of the levels of language – from a single morpheme to an idiomatic phrase to a text extending the traditional limits of a sentence. This stands in opposition to the implicit PCS assumption whereby a linguistic unit is, by definition, a word. Larger stretches of language (texts) are given the status of communicative units. In A/ECL, the concept of language continuum underlies the fundamental distinction between the specificity of meanings of linguistic units and the schematicity of meanings of morphosyntactic constructions. In PCS, primary concern with lexical meaning3 results in neglecting semantic and pragmatic characteristics of morphosyntax. The following example can serve as illustration. The opposition, in contemporary Polish discourse, between two nouns, pan ‘mister’ and obywatel ‘citizen,’ that are used with reference to an adult male, both in declarative statements and as forms of address, could provide ample material

3 “A privileged position in ethnolinguistic research is occupied by lexis […] Through lexical meanings, language is deeply entrenched in culture” (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 17).

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for an analysis carried out in the PCS vein. On the level of lexis, both prove to be culture-specific, carrying distinct ideological loads. The former – traditionally used in formal contexts – was banned by the communist regime, in favor of the latter, which was supposed to carry the meaning of social equality within the egalitarian community. Yet the syntactic level is equally – or perhaps even more – revealing than lexical semantics alone. When used as a form of address, the former noun requires the use of third form singular, as in

(1) Proszę pana, czy może mi pan powiedzieć... I am asking mister if can me mister tell ‘Please, sir, could you tell me…,’

while obywatel calls for second person plural, as in

(2) Obywatelu, powiedzcie mi... Citizen you-PL tell me ‘Citizen, tell me…’

It is not the aim of this essay to provide detailed semantico-pragmatic analyses of (1) or (2); suffice it to say that extending the field of study over syntax might make it possible to gain additional information that could provide starting points for pragmatic and/or contrastive studies.4 Focus upon lexis narrows down the visual field to the exclusion of the theory of dynamic construction of meaning that is known under the name of mental spaces and has been developed within the A/ECL framework. With its emphasis upon the role of discursive context in negotiating meanings, the theory could enrich PCS analyses, especially by introducing into the framework the notion of viewpoint space, i.e. the particular mental space from which a given discourse is being viewed.5 With its focus on point of view and perspective, PCS might perhaps profit from solutions offered by mental spaces theory to such problems as socially and culturally determined differences in linguistic reference. Yet another source of inspiration could perhaps be found in A/ECL descriptions of manifestations of iconicity in natural language. To cite just one example, the iconic principle of sequentiality is often shown to be conditioned by cultural factors. Following Wierzbicka (1985), Bartmiński admits that “[t]he identification of the internal ordering of content makes it possible to talk about

4 For instance, interestingly, the phenomenon signaled in (1) and (2) above is paralleled by the reduction of the personal pronouns Sie and du in the German of Pennsylvania Mennonite communities (cf. Burridge, 2002). 5 For a definition, see Evans (2007, pp. 133, 220).

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the ‘cognitive structure of the concept’” (2009/2012, p. 136), but it seems that the principle has not been discussed in a systematic way. And yet, if we accept the claim whereby in the linear ordering of elements within an expression those which are (subjectively) claimed to be more important tend to come before those of secondary importance, many things are convincingly explained. An apt illustration is the slogan of the Polish Army and the epitome of Polish patriotism,

(3) Bóg, honor, ojczyzna ‘God, honor, homeland,’

where the standard interpretation, i.e. “we shall give to our homeland everything, except the love of God and the honor of a Polish soldier,” is reflected in the ordering of constituent parts. Relations between culture and iconicity, so far largely neglected, certainly deserve systematic investigation. Metaphor and metonymy, considered as most fundamental cognitive processes, lie at the core of the A/ECL theory. In PCS they are also given much attention. However, one feels that the PCS stance could actually be corroborated and strengthened by a more systematic account of metaphor and metonymy, in the vein proposed within the cognitivist framework. The basic cognitivist assumption concerning ubiquity of metaphor as a means of taming reality and bringing it closer to direct experience of human beings tallies with the foundational PCS principle of sociocultural conditionings of language creation, development, and use. The metonymic character of all metaphors (i.e. selection and transfer of certain characteristics of source domain objects over target domain counterparts at the cost of others) is considered a matter of course, and the need to investigate linguistic worldviews with reference to metaphorical extensions of basic concepts is taken for granted (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 24). But the analysis might become more systematic and more coherent if PCS accepted the assumption that metaphorical extensions – in PCS considered to constitute just one aspect of linguistic pictures of units – are indeed the result of the working of the governing mechanism that determines “dictionary- meaning derivations,” “word-formational derivatives”, “phraseological units and proverbs,” and “finally, texts” (pp. 24-25). Metonymy – clearly a culture-sensitive conceptual mechanism active in a great majority of notions and determining the shape of lexical items analyzed by PCS scholars – plays an important role in A/ ECL descriptions of language. Disguised as Langackerian active zones or salience, it is truly ubiquitous in A/ECL investigations, which could certainly profit if more attention was paid to sociocultural factors governing the selection of “some characteristics at the expense of others” (cf. e.g. Niebrzegowska-Bartmińska, 2007, p. 31, quoted in Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 32). On the other hand, a more extensive understanding of the hierarchical structure of conceptual metaphors and their instantiations might add coherence to PCS analyses. The affiliations of

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the two frameworks and potential profit deriving from their closer integration are clearly seen in Barmiński’s extensive analysis of “the concept of seeing,” which easily translates into the A/ECL metaphor UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, pp. 96-117). Yet another difference between the two theories concerns their treatment of language varieties. In spite of postulates put forward by Langacker and his followers, A/ECL researchers do not pay much attention to sociolinguistic factors that influence language differentiation, while in PCS the proportions are skewed towards folklore, sometimes at the expense of a more general view upon language. In consequence, while A/ECL puts too much emphasis on “language as such” (langue), in PCS proportions are shifted towards parole. Choosing a (common?) middle course might perhaps prove profitable for both frameworks.

4.3. Problems and shortcomings

Among problems that have not yet found plausible solutions in either of the two theories one should perhaps mention the perennial question concerning mutual relations between semantics and pragmatics. For Langacker, the demarcation line between the two depends on the needs of a particular description, i.e. it lies, so to speak, in the eye of the beholder: “semantics and pragmatics form a gradation” (Langacker, 2008, p. 40). For Bartmiński, the borderline between the two tends to disappear. For instance, when he speaks about “the semantics of seemingly ‘the same’, international, transnational or pan-European concepts” (p. 222), most linguists would classify the meanings in question as contextually interpreted (or interpretable), which is a case of pragmatics par excellence. To different degrees, both theories are concerned with communication as the main function of language. Both admit the obvious principle of (textual or discursive) interaction as a necessary condition for communication. However, even though it is only Bartmiński who openly concedes the limitation,6 both frameworks focus upon homo loquens at the expense of homo audiens. The need to incorporate the receiver of messages into the analysis – if only by admitting that it has not been meant and/or achieved – is recognized, even though the idea has not yet been fully implemented. Shortcomings of A/ECL and PCS result from the character of the theoretical and methodological principles that underlie the two approaches. A/ECL

6 “The approach to ethnolinguistics presented in this book amounts to what I hope can be considered an integral theory of language, with the human speaking subject (homo loquens) at the centre.” (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 222, emphasis E.T.)

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investigates standard (American) English (the native tongue of its founding father), and a handful of exotic languages studied by Langacker’s students and followers; attempts to apply the theory when describing other languages (notably those boasting rich flexion, which becomes the cognitive linguist’s nightmare) are still rather scarce.7 By contrast, Bartmiński and his students and followers investigate contemporary Polish, with a focus upon its colloquial and folk varieties. Bartmiński’s view of the world is “folk linguistic,” and his main concern is with the “colloquial conceptualization of the world” (2009/2012, p. 72). Not limited by formal and procedural rigors imposed by Langacker’s model of grammar, PCS does not suffer from its inadequacies as revealed by its limited applicability to Slavic languages. But focusing upon lexis, considered to be distinct from other levels of language, sometimes turns problematic precisely due to PCS’s strict adherence to formal taxonomies.

4.4. Methodology

While A/ECL still suffers from the legacy of its predecessors and – in spite of claims to the contrary – still often relies on the linguists’ self-made linguistic artifacts, PCS actually implements the fundamental A/ECL principle of the bottom-up approach, aiming at constructing a usage-based model. To reduce the risk of arbitrariness of selection and subjectivity of interpretation and in agreement with the long tradition of field linguistics, which is now supported by modern technology, they use linguistic corpora as well as interviews and questionnaires.8 On the other hand, a certain lack of terminological discipline occasionally results in potential misunderstandings.9 In its search for intersubjectivity, A/ECL has also been demonstrating due understanding of the relevance of the slogan “corpora save.” It insists on terminological strictness, but terminological consistency occasionally becomes lost in translation.

7 Even so, providing a full list would mean extending the limits of this essay. As noteworthy exceptions, however, one should perhaps mention pioneering work done by Brygida Rudzka-Ostyn (1984, 1996) or research done by Laura Janda and her colleagues on Czech, Russian, Polish and other Slavic languages (Janda, 1993, 2007; Janda & Clancy, 2002). 8 For the last few years, the literature on the subject has been growing steadily. Among representative recent work one should mention that done by Dylan Glynn and his colleagues (cf. e.g. Glynn & Fischer, 2007), and – in Poland – by Barbara Lewandowska- Tomaszczyk and her co-authors (2008, 2010). 9 For instance, does the opposition between “sensory and mental meanings” (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 101) parallel that between the literal and the figurative?

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4.5. Scope

In agreement with Bartmiński’s claims, PCS investigates lexical semantics rather than the semantics of grammar (or ethnosyntax, as defined by Wierzbicka (1979, 1999) and her followers). While Bartmiński’s statement that “[t]he most obvious, unquestionable basis for investigating linguistic worldview has so far been the lexis” (2009/2012, p. 26) is of course perfectly true, more consideration for the implications of Langacker’s slogan “grammar is symbolic” might add new dimensions to the PCS theory. However, the founding father of the project envisages its development as going in a different direction when he writes that “the most urgent task in comparative typological research” is “the initiation of cross-cultural analyses […] of the semantics of the sociopolitical and ethical lexis” (p. 220, emphasis E.T.). Thus its main field remains within the area devoted to “broadly defined philology, i.e. the science of words, or ‘anthropology of the word’” (p. 95; reference to Godlewski, Mencwel, & Sulima, 2003).

4.6. Worldviews and grammars

Pointing out ways of grammatically encoding people’s worldviews is not a new idea in linguistic literature written within different theoretical frameworks and by authors of different theoretical persuasions. The findings corroborate those of the PCS proponents of “anthropology of the word,” thus substantiating the plea for an integrated approach that incorporates all levels of language. Notorious cases in point are Polish derivation and flexion, and the first author to mention in this context is Anna Wierzbicka, a chief propagator of ethnolinguistic studies. Her analysis of Polish diminutives (Wierzbicka, 1990), although ostensibly not written in the strictly cognitivist vein, reveals pertinent relations between morphology and culture. The schematic meaning of Polish diminutivized common and proper nouns, contrasted with the generally “diminutive-less” English of Australia, shows how morphology conspires with metaphorically extended lexical meanings to express culturally loaded notions. In his survey of Ryszard Tokarski’s analysis of reflections in Polish lexis of the feelings of low and high esteem in reference to people (Tokarski, 1990), Bartmiński lists nouns used metaphorically to describe people’s behavior. Among other entries, he quotes the diminutive noun chorągiewka ‘flag’-DIM, used (metaphorically) with reference to people of weak character or low moral standards. But the key questions of why it is the diminutive that implies lack of esteem and why the basic noun carries no emotional undertones are not even asked. They could, however, be convincingly answered in terms of “symbolic grammar”: the schematic meaning “small in size” – in the metaphorical sense of insignificant or lacking in value – collides with the notion of moral strength, which makes people (metaphorically) “large in size.”

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And this is why one of the Polish ministers, scornfully addressed in public by the noun ministerek ‘minister’-DIM, took strong offence, and this public dismissal thundered through Polish media: government ministers are not supposed to be “small in size,” at least not in the metaphorically extended sense. Another example of culturally-loaded Polish grammar is given by two cognitive linguists writing about the Polish dative (Dąbrowska, 1997; Rudzka- Ostyn, 1996). They provide a description of the schematic meaning of the Polish dative in terms of “sphere of influence,” which may be invaded by objects that (metaphorically) enter it, affecting the experiencer. Thus

(4) a. dziecko mi zachorowało Child me-DAT became ill ‘My child got ill,’

carries a stronger emotional load than the neutral and objective

(4) b. Moje dziecko zachorowało my child became ill ‘My child got ill.’

The “sphere of influence” section of Polish grammar reflects a picture of the world in which the homo loquens has no control over phenomena that enter his personal sphere and pay no heed to his own feelings. Thus in

(5) Jest mi wstyd Is to me shame ‘I am ashamed’

the shame just “happens” to the speaker. The ultimate example of the grammar of helplessness and lack of control is the use of the Russian instrumental, discussed by Wierzbicka (1999, pp. 392- 401):

(6) Ego pridavilo sosnoj He-ACC crushed-NEUT pine-INSTR ‘He was crushed by a pine.’

A case of “Russian fatalism”, (6) grammatically conveys the (conventionalized, objective) worldview whereby human beings cannot get to know the world around them; the picture of the world includes phenomena that can be neither explained nor adequately described: the pine is just an instrument used by some unknown – and unknowable – powerful forces. The fact that the construction

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exemplified in (6) has no counterpart in non-Slavic languages (English, for example) clearly points to the culture-sensitivity of the linguistic worldview. Most probably, sociocultural factors can also govern syntactic innovation. An illuminating example comes from a variety of American English, the so-called “language of prosperity theology,” where the belief in the power of prayer in bringing earthly bliss to the faithful is reflected in expressions like

(7) I believe for a car. (after Pasicka, 2010)

All the examples given above, although selected at random, suggest that the linguistic worldview, as reflected in linguistic pictures of the world, is shaped by linguistic means extending beyond lexical meaning, even if such meaning is considered encyclopaedic in nature. Morphosyntactic devices are also available, and used.

5. Recapitulation

Although the achievements of PCS are unquestionable, its claim to the status of “an integral theory of language” (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 222) contains, hopefully, also its future developments. Potential expansion of the field will surely make the analyses more comprehensive and more complete, even though the claim that “the linguistic worldview conception opts for maximal meaning, i.e. one that includes not only taxonomic (necessary and sufficient) features but all the linguistically and culturally relevant features” (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 217, emphasis in the original) sets a goal that seems impossible to achieve, by (the cognitive) definition. In view of the inherently subjective and dynamic nature of meaning, the list must remain open. At its present stage, what has been called the “Lublin School of Ethnolinguistics ” is in fact the “Lublin School of Ethnopragmatics,” with its focus on sociocultural conditionings of lexis. What seems needed is more emphasis upon ethnosyntax, which assumes “the existence of a specifiable culture-related semantic content which is literally built into the morphosyntactic structures of the language” (Goddard, 2002, p. 58). The present limitations of PCS do not, however, justify criticism. What it does, it does extremely well. It has many merits. First, it builds welcome bridges between the “West” and the “East” – not only in the literal, geographical sense by developing networks embracing scholars working in Poland’s eastern neighboring countries, but also by striving for closer integration of PCS with “mainstream” brands of linguistic cognitivism. On the other hand, it promotes Slavic languages in non-Slavic academic circles, where the knowledge of and about them is still rather scarce.

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Second, the postulate of bringing linguistic and literary studies closer together and bridging the gap dug by advocates of strict demarcation lines between disciplines that build up the field of humanistic studies is invaluable. Practical results of that work are easily seen, if only by reading papers published in the “red series,” and written both by linguists and by literary scholars. Last but not least, by their focus on colloquial language and folklore, PCS draws linguists’ attention to phenomena that tend to be ignored by other schools of contemporary linguistics, e.g. the investigation of “pragmatic residua” or folk etymologies.

6. Coda

As a final conclusion, Randy LaPolla’s travesty of Talmy Givón’s aphorism may be aptly quoted: “Today’s ethnosyntax is yesterday’s ethnopragmatics” (quoted in Goddard, 2002, p. 62). Combined with another aphorism, i.e. “Synchrony in diachrony,” it sets the pace for a further development of ethnolinguistics. Long live PCS!

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References

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Tabakowska, Elżbieta. (2005). Iconicity as a function of point of view. In Constantino Maeder, Olga Fischer, & William J. Herlofsky (Eds.), Outside-In –

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Inside-Out. Iconicity in Language an Literature 4 (pp. 375-388). Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Talmy, Leonard. (1996). Fictive motion in language and -ception. In Paul Bloom, Mary A. Peterson, Lynn Nadel, and Merrill F. Garret (Eds.), Language and Space (pp. 211-276). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Tokarczuk, Olga. (2004). Ostatnie historie. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie.

Tokarski, Ryszard. (1990). Językowy obraz świata w metaforach potocznych. In Jerzy Bartmiński (Ed.), Językowy obraz świata (pp. 69-86). Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Wierzbicka, Anna. (1979). Ethno-syntax and the philosophy of grammar. Studies in Language, 3 (3), 313-383.

Wierzbicka, Anna. (1985). Lexicography and Conceptual Analysis. Ann Arbor: Karoma.

Wierzbicka Anna. (1990). Podwójne życie człowieka dwujęzycznego. In Władysław Miodunka (Ed.), Język polski w świecie (pp. 71-104). Warszawa-Kraków: PWN.

Wierzbicka, Anna. (1999). Etnoskładnia i filozofia gramatyki. In Anna Wierzbicka, Język – umysł – kultura, Ed. Jerzy Bartmiński (pp. 341-401). Warszawa: PWN.

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Chapter 18 Reflections upon Bartmiński’s ethnolinguistic approach to language and culture

James W. Underhill University of Rouen, France

1. Introduction

The invitation to make a challenge to Jerzy Bartmiński’s approach to ethnolinguistics is characteristic of the Lublin School’s mode of research and its relationship with ideas. The Lublin School has been synthesizing approaches to language and culture over the past thirty years, and this has been done through dialogue. Jerzy Bartmiński knows how to set up events which will allow researchers from throughout the world to come together to explore conceptions of culture and, more specifically, the Polish worldview as a linguistically- constructed framework for thinking and feeling. I am, I must confess, a very sincere admirer of Jerzy Bartmiński’s great, wide-reaching and profoundly sensitive work. I share the Lublin school’s interest in ethnolinguistics, and I define my own approach in Underhill (2012), where I make close reference to Bartmiński’s work on MATKA ‘mother’ and DOM ‘house/home.’ And, since finishing that work, I have been able to enjoy discovering the richness and complexity of what the Poles mean and how they feel about WODA ‘water’ from reading the Dictionary of Folk Stereotypes and Symbols (SSSL 1996-2012]. This is remarkable work, a work that changes the way we see words and the way we feel about the world. In this sense, Jerzy Bartmiński is something of a poet. He and his fellow researchers transform our perspective. Readers of the Dictionary no longer feel the same way about water after understanding how the Poles perceive WODA ‘water’ and WÓDKA ‘vodka.’ Contemplating żywa woda (lit. ‘living water’, vol. 1 (2), pp. 235-246), enables readers to reflect upon the way the folk traditions of Europe and of the Slavic nations have converged with Greek and Christian conceptions of water’s symbolic significance and its relationship to life, spiritual life in particular. Magic, animism and orthodox religion fuse in that conception. And understanding this helps bring us back to the world in which we live by heightening our sensitivity to currents and whirlpools in the rivers and streams in our town.

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As a philologist, I can no longer perceive of the Czech word, voda, in quite the same way, but have learned to see it as a part of a Slavic folkloric tradition which lives on in the imagination, and which inspires not only poets, but also the great philologists of the Prague Linguistic School, Jakobson and Mukařovský. Water is magical, water is religious. Religion appropriates and transforms a symbol, a conceptual cluster infused with meaning for people and communities. Water occupies a different place in each worldview. Linguistic communities understand “water” with a culture-specific sensibility. In this sense, though religion, culture, language and practical everyday usage will enable us to translate “water” into woda, voda, eau, or Wasser in most instances, the ways different language- cultures feel about “water” and the place it holds in the imagination, is often quite different. This is because many of our words, our thoughts andour feelings are closely bound up in the kind of symbolic architectonics that the Lublin School is concerned with uncovering and exploring. Listen to water. How it trickles and drips. How it flows onwards in ways that sound quite distinct to the speakers of each language-culture. Water as a word spreads, quite aptly, like water throughout the lexicon. Water crystallizes into meaningful forms of thought and feeling within the worldview of each language-culture. For my own part, I do not work in the same way as Jerzy Bartmiński. My approach is different. My languages are different. And I suspect, that given the difference in generations, my sensitivity to ideological and geopolitical questions will be different. So much the better. Jerzy Bartmiński and the members of his Lublin School know all too well that once we accept difference, dialogue becomes possible. That is what enables us to begin to discover and share different perspectives. In this spirit, I propose to stick to the magic seven. I will all too briefly outline seven strengths I find in the Lublin ethnolinguistic approach. I will then make seven challenges to that approach. And I will conclude by providing a brief commentary of Bartmiński and Abramowicz’s (1998) contrastive study of lud, in Polish, and le peuple in French. This will allow me to end with seven questions, intended to demonstrate how the Lublin approach can open up debate and dialogue in the study of linguistically-constructed worldviews beyond the borders of Poland.

2. Seven facets to a rich Contribution to philology

Very briefly, what makes the Lublin ethnolinguistic project so much more interesting and engaging than the anthropological linguistics and the ethnolinguistics being carried out in the US, in Britain, or in France? 1. Part of the richness of the Lublin approach lies in its understanding of Humboldt and his project to investigate the worldviews that languages open

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up to their linguistic communities, those worldviews which people help to cultivate in their everyday speech and their literary creations. This involves a sensitivity to two dimensions of Humboldt’s project which have been largely ignored or confused in French- and English-speaking countries, but which have also been conflated by major German thinkers such as Hegel (cf. Trabant, 1999) and Habermas (cf. Trabant, 1991). Humboldt was interested in the worldview of the language (Weltansicht) and in the conceptual systems and ideologies that emerged from languages (Weltanschauung/en). Thinkers like Raymond Williams, philosophers and historians of ideas, continue to make a great contribution to thought concerning the language of ideology and the ideology implicit and active within language. They do, however, tend to forget the language system, and focus on individual terms extracted from their context. Multilingual philologists working in Central Europe in the post-war period have a much broader interest in language and their insights into the limits and scope of individual language systems offer fascinating new perspectives for discourse analysis and the study of political rhetoric. Perhaps it is because Anna Wierzbicka (1997, 1999, 2010) and Jerzy Bartmiński come from a period in which ideology was so manifestly present in language, a period in which the “war” over the meaning of words was being waged, that they are extremely sensitive not only to these two dimensions of worldview, but, crucially, to the interaction between the two. Because it is a mistake to consider ideologies as conceptual worlds that can be separated from language, or that can be imposed upon a language: ideologies must take root in the worldview of the language. And in doing so, they partially transform language. Abramowicz and Bartmiński (1998) suggest that political systems “steal” words from the people. And they begin by stealing lud, the word for the people, itself. 2. The second strength of the Lublin ethnolinguistic approach is that it is about people. The researchers working in this school do not content themselves with texts and dictionaries. They make surveys. They draw up questionnaires in order to ask the people what they think about their language (cf. Bartmiński, 2009/2012, esp. p. 35). This keeps Lublin’s ethnolinguists close to speech, at a time when many approaches are becoming more formal in their methodologies and more impersonal in their underlying conceptual frameworks. 3. The field research of the Lublin School in towns and villages allows it to avoid the pitfall of reducing a culture to the image that its capital projects of it. France likes to export itself as being epitomized in Paris. This is a marketing strategy. But it betrays a deeply cultural and conceptual reflex. Four hundred years of centralization and State-approved culture makes itself felt in this reflex. Cultures often present themselves as essentialized entities.

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The nation as a whole is reduced to the capital, the decision-making center, the seat of government. The obvious disadvantage of this for the study of languages and worldviews is that most people neither live in the capital nor see themselves or their lives reflected in it. The Lublin approach insists upon the folk, the Polish as a whole, as a reality, not as a reductive stereotype. And far from making that approach parochial or provincial, the field research carried out keeps its linguists closer to the grass-roots reality of the way most Poles experience the world. 4. The Lublin School has attracted students from a wide number of other cultures to it from other Eastern and Western European countries (e.g. Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Lithuania, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Serbia, Germany, Belgium; recently even from Japan). This allows an exchange in which worldviews and identities can be compared and contrasted, defined and opposed in intelligent and open-minded dialogue. 5. The drive of the Lublin school is towards what Saussure would have called the synchrony of language, the meaning of words within the living system. But the historical aspect, the trajectory of words through space and time is ever-present in this approach. Diachrony is never eclipsed. Words and ideas, symbols and “stereotypes,” values and judgments, are situated within a cultural and a historical context, as the study of “water” shows all too well. 6. Literature remains central for this approach. The Lublin School has preserved a philological point of view at a time in which many linguists are tempted by formal approaches. Contemporary linguists are interested in investigating neuroscience and the hardwiring of the brain, reflexes and automatic responses. Such researchers find little place for literature, however. And it is worth asking ourselves what we lose when we drop literature. We eclipse history, culture, and individuals: individuals cultivating a highly personal relationship with language. The Lublin School treats literary and historical texts as voices within the living worldview. And a great diversity of voices makes itself heard within the research of the Lublin approach. 7. The importance of profiling (cf. Bartmiński, 2009/2012, chapters 8, 13, and 15) for the Lublin School must also be stressed. Rigorous research demonstrates the way words take root within the reality of a culture. But words change hue and form as they take root in different discourses. Jerzy Bartmiński and his colleagues are careful to distinguish between the way words work within political, social, emotional and religious contexts. The results of profiling concepts make this approach so much more satisfying than reading dictionary definitions. This takes us beyond a mere hermeneutics or interpretation of meaning. And that is crucial for the study of worldviews. The Lublin School invites us to begin an almost encyclopedic catalogue o feeling and understanding. This opens up a whole new dimension to the meaning of meanings.

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3. Seven challenges

Very briefly, let me list my challenges, a series of queries and misgivings which might serve if they are taken up in future discussion and debate, or used as starting points for future research among the students of the Lublin School. 1. Profiling has proven its usefulness. But perhaps we should be on our guard. The separation of usages tends to obscure the interrelated meanings and the entangled trajectories of words. To separate the Biblical or religious meaning from the political one is misleading. Concepts like FREEDOM, PEOPLE and even HOPE turn out to be both religious and political. The Americans interpret their vocation for spreading “freedom” as a political imperative, an economically viable enterprise and a religious quest. God gave America to the Founding Fathers, they believe. Their vocation was to create a New World, and they cannot come back to the Old World or enter into debate with leaders of North Africa or Asia without believing they are called upon by what they consider to be their “manifest destiny” to remake the world in the image of God. In this sense, to “free” people is to Americanize them. So much for FREEDOM but what of PEOPLE? PEOPLE is first and foremost a religious concept. It derives from the Old Testament. And this will color the way the German fascists adopt the term Volk, appropriate it. They understand the German people as a “lost people” who must be found and led through the wilderness to the land of milk and honey: led, (gefuhrt) by a leader, a Führer. Ein Reich, ein Volk, ein Führer [One Reich, one people, one leader] owes its coherence to this appropriation of Biblical conceptual paradigms and religious rhetoric. What do these two examples show? That meanings are entangled. Profiles are therefore useful fictions. But the different dimensions of any one concept which the Lublin School is anxious to distinguish are inextricably bound together and mutually-conditioning. 2. Oppositions in language tend to condition meanings. But when it comes to comparing languages, of course, the oppositions turn out to be structurally different. And the division of reality into spheres of experience covered by individual synonyms and related terms is therefore different in nature in any two languages. French will translate wolność ‘freedom’ into liberté. But in English, two terms exist, freedom and liberty, and while their meanings are largely synonymous, they do not cover the same spheres of reality: freedom is related more to movement and personal choice, liberty is more intellectual, political and potentially radical. 3. Such questions are downplayed if we work within the frameworks of contemporary Anglo-American linguistics, as Bartmiński (2009/2012) does. Because, in this work, at least, he is attaching profiling and facets to prototypical meaning. The question is: Do prototypes work for words and what he calls “stereotypes”? Or is Wittgenstein’s model of “family resemblances” not more apt?

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4. This seems to indicate that Jerzy Bartmiński remains, at one level, more of a philosopher than a philologist. The philosopher assumes that terms refer to given objects of reality. Those objects might be “objects of the understanding” as both Locke and Kant would have understood the term, but they belong to “something out there.” In following Humboldt, I am deeply skeptical about the idea that words can be seen as labels for trans-lingual realities. Is love the same the world over? I can love my wife, Grenoble and hamburgers. But translating those claims proves difficult in Polish (kocham or uwielbiam). This tends to suggest that LOVE does not coincide with any one given Polish concept. And it suggests that English-speakers must make an effort to open up to the understanding and feeling that traces the contours of Polish concept-words such as miłość ‘love (n)’ and kochać ‘love (v).’ It moreover seems unlikely that that opposition is paralleled by the distinction loving-liking in English or aimer vs. aimer-bien in French. 5. The absence of corpus work in the Lublin ethnolinguistic approach is perplexing. 6. The place of translation within this approach needs to be established, consolidated, and defended. What are the essential foreign texts that have helped cultivate Polish literature? The Bible? Shakespeare? What others? How did the daily translation of Russian into Polish affect the Polish worldview? And how is that worldview holding up to the daily influence of English journalism and its translation into Polish? What strategies have Poles adopted to resist the importation of foreign conceptual paradigms? 7. Finally, my seventh objection relates to the inevitable nature of encyclopedic work. All approaches have their limits. Trying to cover everything – the whole of experience – tends to close off discussion to speculation. Sprachdenken, thinking about language and thinking-in-language, in Humboldt’s approach is more about generating questions than about finding answers. And it is for this reason that after briefly appraising the Lublin work on lud, I will end, in an open- ended fashion, with questions.

4. Searching for the people

In considering how “the people” are constituted, represented and even perceived in different languages, I am walking in the footsteps of Jerzy Bartmiński and Maciej Abramowicz (1998). But I am not walking alone. With an Italian colleague Mariarosaria Gianninoto, a specialist in Chinese, we have begun considering the way the concept of “the people” can be contrasted in Chinese, English, American, French, German, and Czech. I would like simply to offer the first insights into the comparison of the partially coinciding concepts that exist in French and English, and will use Czech and German simply to offset what dimensions and facets of

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the concepts are highlighted or obscured in each of the language systems. From this point of view what we failed to find becomes just as interesting as what we found. Some languages, some cultures, have a problem with “the people.” Thinking the people is perfectly possible in Polish. Thinking it in other languages proves harder. And this, of course, betrays the way dominant ideologies feel about the people, the way they distance themselves from the people, and the way they treat what they tend to consider as “the masses.” Bartmiński and Abramowicz’s work is facilitated by the fact that French and Polish do indeed provide a largely analogous concept. As they point out (1998, pp. 16-17), the words lud and peuple cover three main meanings: 1. “ethnos,” a great group of humans that can be gathered together because they inhabit the same area or share the same laws, customs or religion; 2. a mass of people, a crowd or multitude; 3. the lower social orders, classes of people without rights or privileges. Both languages provide a concept that can be characterized as sharing four fundamental characteristics in the imagination: lud-peuple is (i) impersonal, (ii) united, (iii) passive, and (iv) laborious. It is an indivisible whole that is deprived of individual characteristics, and that is perceived from without. It is not represented as self-motivated or as being inspired by a will proper to itself. Its passive representation does, however, paradoxically, contrast with the fact that the people is the source of great works. In French and Polish, the people is a working class, a force. Bartmiński and Abramowicz find a very different attitude towards the people in the two language-cultures. In French, contempt and condescension are palpable. Ca fait peuple (that belongs to the people) remains an insult, a gesture of contempt. The peuple are both uncultivated and cultureless. This is not so of the paysannerie in France. The farmers and small landholders have their culture, their identity and they continue to claim their rights, but they do not belong to the peuple. The peuple are city-citizens in the French imagination, and they are deprived of culture or roots. The peuple often inspire repugnance and can inspire pity, but the people is rarely celebrated in French. Lud, on the other hand, resonates very differently within the Polish imagination. Lud, Bartmiński and Abramowicz teach us, is related to the culture of the people. It is a concept profoundly enrooted in the Polish lands, a concept which can be celebrated and idealized.

5. Corpus findings

Did the findings of Bartmiński and Abramowicz stand up to further research into the French conception of le peuple? In a word, yes. This at least was the impression that emerged from corpus-based work at four levels. I began with

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dictionaries and encyclopedias in German (Brockhaus Enzyklopädie, 1994), French (Encyclopædia Universalis, 2008 ; Grand Larousse, 1992 ; Littré, 2007 ; Dictionnaire culturel, 2005), and English (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2005). I then set about working online with Google. And I studied The British National Corpus and Coca, a four hundred million word American corpus. In addition to this, I worked with what I call MyEnglishCorpus, my own reference corpus of one million words of compiled texts that I know well in English and a similar 1.3 million word corpus in French. And finally, I gathered together a series of ten articles related to the theme of “the people” in French, the English spoken in England, and American English. This research generated the following findings. 1. Volk in German functions as a meaningful network of consolidated and emerging meanings. Meanwhile, lidé in Czech appears to function like lud in Polish covering both the people of the land and the city. Like lud, lidé can be used to designate a patriotic and political force. Both Volk and lidé can both be celebrated and venerated. Patriotism, idealism, and political action can be taken up by the people in both Czech and German. 2. At the same time, the people is often manipulated, often flattered and pandered to in demagogical strategies in these languages. Reigning ideologies do, of course, seek to misuse the term. Bartmiński and Abramowicz speak of the “theft” of words by the communists, but this word should be used with care. It seems preferable to use the word “appropriation,” because speakers of language never fully allow ideologies to pervert their concepts. They resist linguistic domination by critique, debate and strategies of irony, and jokes. And the fact that the main serious newspaper in the Czech Republic today is called Lidové Noviny (The People’s News) bears witness to the fact that speakers can “re- appropriate” the word lidé. 3. In French, the prejudice that Bartmiński and Abramowicz speak of is inescapable when corpora are studied. There are exceptions, but the overwhelming impression that emerges is one of absence. There emerge very few examples of a real, clearly discerned and convincing group of people in French. We might hope for a great schism that comes with the French Revolution, and, indeed we do see introduced in this period a whole series of key phrases related to representation and democracy for the people. This is short-lived, however. The prejudice proves tenacious. At certain crucial moments, such as the elections, politicians address the people. Nicolas Sarkozy adopted this strategy in the run up to 2012 elections. The Socialist Party did not. The traditional-left wing party, Le Front de Gauche, made ample use of the term, but though it made great headway in the Presidential elections in May 2012, its performance in the Legislative elections in June 2012 was disappointing. The consequence of

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this state of affairs is worrying:le peuple seems to be becoming a fixed point on the reactionary far right, le Front National. In recent years the former leader of the party, Jean-Marie Le Pen and his daughter Marine Le Pen, who has taken over the leadership, address the resentful downwardly-mobile white population that wishes a return to protectionism and is hostile to Europe and to immigration. Le Front de Gauche made considerable progress in struggling against this movement, but the Front National appears to be anchoring the concept of the people on the right, at the expense of the left and the center.

6. Conclusion

This study of “the people” is a work in progress: it is by nature open-ended. It is an adventure into the territories that languages open up to us when we set about entering into the way they organize and relate concepts. In this vein, I will end with seven questions. These can be considered challenges which ethnolinguistic study can open up to us. 1. What role does PEOPLE play in the English language-culture? 2. How does the American PEOPLE contrast with the English PEOPLE? 3. How does translation introduce concepts of the people which are foreign to a language, but which transform the meanings of the word in the language they enter? 4. Can the French and the English speak of democracy, the government of the people by the people, if they no longer have an active conception of the people as a reality and as an ideal? 5. How does opposition to other nations give rise to the self-definition of a people (in German, Czech, Polish, and Scottish English for example)? 6. How did the communists preserve and celebrate the culture of the people? And to what extent did ideological concerns pervert the idea? 7. How are contemporary democracies in Eastern Europe preserving or weakening the concept of the people, and how are those peoples to find their place in a Europe that is made up of the union of peoples many of which no longer seem to consider themselves as “peoples” or show much concern for “the people”? Answering such questions will require a great deal of research. It will force researchers both to confront the limits of their own worldviews and to open up to the possibilities which foreign language-cultures present them with. This forms part of the “work of the mind” that Wilhelm von Humboldt spoke of when he explained that languages create worlds, and that thinking is thinking-in- language (Sprachdenken). The Lublin school plays an important role in keeping that tradition alive.

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References

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (2009/2012). Aspects of Cognitive Ethnolinguistics. Sheffield and Oakville, CT: Equinox.

Bartmiński, Jerzy, & Abramowicz, Maciej. (1998). “Peuple” et “lud” – deux notions, deux paradigmes socio-cultureles. In Danuta Bartol-Jarosińska (Ed.), Langues et peuples d’Europe Centrale et Orientale dans la culture francaise (pp. 15-26). Paris: Institut d’études slaves.

Brockhaus Enzyklopädie in vierundzwanzig Bänden. (1994). Vol. 19: Us-Wej. Mannheim: Brockhaus.

Dictionnaire culturel, Le Robert. (2005). In 4 vols. Ed. Alain Rey. Vol. III. Paris: Robert.

Encyclopaedia Britannica. (2005). Vol. 9. London: Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Encyclopædia Universalis. (2008). 24 vols. Vol. 18. Paris: Encyclopædia Universalis.

Grand Larousse. (1992). 15 vols. Vol. 11. Lizy-sur-Ourcq: Jean Didier.

Littré: Dictionnaire de référence de la langue française. (2007). 20 vols. Vol. 14: Package – Pis. Paris: Garnier.

SSSL. (1996-2012). Słownik stereotypów i symboli ludowych. Vols. 1 (1-4). Ed. Jerzy Bartmiński & Stanisława Niebrzegowska-Bartmińska. Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Trabant, Jürgen. (1991). Habermas lecteur de Humboldt: Générer le monde ou résoudre des problèmes. In Henri Meschonnic (Ed.), Le langage comme défi (pp. 269-286). Saint-Denis: Presses universitaires de Vincennes.

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Trabant, Jürgen. (1999). Traditions de Humboldt. Paris: Maison des sciences de l’homme. [German edition 1990]

Underhill, James W. (2012). Ethnolinguistics and Cultural Concepts: Truth, Love, Hate and War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wierzbicka, Anna. (1997). Understanding Cultures through their Key Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wierzbicka, Anna. (1999). Emotions across Languages and Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wierzbicka, Anna. (2010). Experience, Evidence and Sense: The Hidden Cultural Legacy of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Chapter 19 Language vis-à-vis culture in Jerzy Bartmiński’s cognitive ethnolinguistics

Przemysław Łozowski UMCS, Lublin, Poland

1. Introduction

It is safe to assume that Jerzy Bartmiński’s way of doing cognitive ethnolinguistics ultimately results from how he relates language and culture to each other, what he envisages their mutual relationship to be like, or how he brings language and culture together in his research program. In short, Bartmiński’s paradigm remains sensitive to how one sees the language-culture interface.1 This, in rough terms, reduces to the question of directionality: which direction do we prefer to take in relating language and culture: from culture to language, or from language to culture, thus giving research priority, or precedence, to one over the other?2 In this contribution, then, we examine the language-culture relationship in Bartmiński’s (2009/2012) research program (here also: ACE, 2009/2012) with regard to the problem of directionality. Why should this be at all relevant? Because the answer to the directionality question determines the very object of research, its methodological orientation,

1 The same can perhaps be said of any other modern linguistics-based methodology. The history of modern linguistics may, indeed, be written with regard to the inclusion/exclusion of the parameter of culture. At the simplest, we have two broad kinds of linguistics: with and without cultural considerations. The culture-friendly type would include typically (non-autonomous) function- and performance-oriented methodologies, whereas the culture-hostile type would embrace mostly (autonomous) form- and competence-oriented ones. 2 The question of directionality in the language-culture interface proves relevant only once we assume that language and culture are at all interrelated, comparable, or at least compatible. As long as the whole point is to show that the way we use language and the way we cherish culture are not independent from each other, directionality is not an issue. One notable example of that is Wierzbicka (1997). What explains her enthusiastic references to Boas, Sapir, or Whorf is that she calls on the three in support of her claims while tackling the autonomous position of Pinker (pp. 6-23). Had she asked the question of directionality, her enthusiasm for the three North American classics might have been far more moderate.

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its points of focus. In this context, let us drop one preliminary note. To the Polish audience, Bartmiński’s program is better known under the name of językowy obraz świata, or, in direct translation into English, linguistic picture of the world. Both labels are ambiguous, each of the two possible interpretations licensing a different research orientation of the language-culture relationship. One of them favors culture, which is when the intended syntagma is [językowy] [obraz świata], or [linguistic] [picture of the world]. We then assume that there exist ready-made and independently-pictured experience-based conceptualizations of the world we live in to which language may but does not have to be applied; what we learn about the world from language is part of what we know of the world from our cultural experience. On the other hand, the syntagma of [językowy obraz] [świata], or [linguistic picture of] [the world], suggests that our world does not exist otherwise than as pictured in/by language, or, at least, that the sense of the world we have is linguistic in nature. The object of research shifts, then, from cultural imprint on language, as in [linguistic] [picture of the world], to linguistic imprint on culture, as in [linguistic picture of] [the world].3 But what is at stake extends, naturally, beyond mere terminology, and involves a whole way of thinking about culture and language, which calls for more general background to the problem.

2. Language and culture: together or apart?

That language and culture are interrelated may seem self-apparent, but that there is a dialectic relationship between the two has not always been easily or readily recognized. Yet in 19th century linguistics, the study of cultural background was taken to be indispensable for understanding what language is all about. Michel Bréal would then write in his seminal (1897) book that “language is an interpretation [Fr. une traduction] of reality” (p. 275), and

3 In Bartmiński (2009/2012), the term used is linguistic worldview. Though, syntagmatically at least, it corresponds to the [linguistic] [picture of the world] interpretation, rather than to [linguistic picture of] [the world] one, Bartmiński himself admits that it can in any case be given either a subject- or an object-orientation. In the former, the perceiving subject’s experience comes to the fore, whereas in the latter “the focus is on the object, i.e. that which is contained in language itself” (p. 76). More descriptive wordings given to one’s methodological stand on the language-culture relationship happen to be far more straightforward. Of these, the best known is perhaps Wittgenstein’s Thesis 5.6, in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt,” which produces an equally unambiguous phrase in English, “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world.’ Both the German and English versions point to the structuring, if not determining, powers of language over experience, or, as Bartmiński would have it, to an object-orientation of the linguistic worldview conception.

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that “history is the only thing that makes it possible for us to understand words with precision” (p. 124). No wonder now that one broad name used in reference to the ideas that prevailed in 19th century linguistics is historical- philological. 20th century linguistic research, in turn, would rather see language as autonomous, independent, and unrelated to these non-linguistic factors that we tend to jointly call culture. This thesis is usually attributed to Saussure. He disregards the importance of cultural considerations for the study of language in the following well-known passage:

The language itself is a system which admits no other order than its own. This can be brought out by comparison with the game of chess. In the case of chess, it is relatively easy to distinguish between what is external [non-systemic] and what is internal [systemic]. The fact that chess came from Persia to Europe is an external fact, whereas everything which concerns the system and its rules is internal. If pieces made of ivory are substituted for pieces made of wood, the change makes no difference to the system. But if the number of pieces is diminished or increased, that is a change which profoundly affects the “grammar” of the game. (Saussure, 1916, here: 1983, p. 23)

In chess, the value of a given piece is determined exclusively by the actual configuration of all the pieces on the chessboard. What that piece is made of is completely irrelevant. No matter whether it is made of gold, stone, or wood, its importance consists in how useful it appears to be in the overall strategy of the game. So, it may happen, as it often does, that a minor piece, such as a pawn, proves absolutely crucial in a given configuration, as it, for example, contributes to the checkmating of the opponent’s king. Similarly in language, everything depends on how a given element is related to the other elements at a given point in time. If chair is a meaningful word in English, it is because the system of the English language has generated the form chair for the speakers to give it an arbitrary meaning and use it conventionally. There is then an open controversy about whether or not linguists are prepared to admit that the way people use their language can be in any way dependent on how people live, think, and construct their culture. One of the reasons why the historical-philological school of linguistics was quite favorable to the possibility of relating language and culture was that linguistics was seen as one of the human sciences (as opposed to natural sciences). As Geeraerts (2010, pp. 13-14) makes the case for 19th century scholars, human sciences (linguistics included, to be remembered)

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try to understand, by means of an emphatic process of interpretation..., the cultural forms of expression in which men have, throughout history, laid down their experience of the world[,] try to reconstruct the original experience that lies at the basis of particular forms of human expression that have been transmitted from earlier times to the present day; they look for the expressive intention behind historical forms of expression.

All of this can now be identified in one of the latest developments in linguistics known as functional linguistics and, especially, in one of its branches, cognitive linguistics. The very names functional and cognitive are meant to highlight the supposition that language is shaped by the functions people ascribe to language, of which the most important is that language expresses human cognition, experience, or, most generally, culture. To quote Ronald Langacker, a prominent and leading cognitivist,

Language is shaped and constrained by the functions it serves. These include the semiological function of allowing conceptualizations to be symbolized by means of sounds and gestures, as well as a multifaceted interactive function involving communication, manipulation, expressiveness, and social communion. ... Cognitive and functional linguists find that virtually everything in language is motivated... (even if very little is strictly predictable). (Langacker, 2008, pp. 1-4, 10)

In practice, then, the language we speak is, both in the form it has and in the substance it communicates, sensitive to society and culture because, as Narrog (2010: 408) summarizes the point, “the specific vocabulary and structure of languages are the diachronic product of the activities of their users in specific cultures and societies.” It may seem that, at least on the grounds of language-culture studies, the correlation between the two can only be positive, undeniable, if not inalienable. In reality, even Sapir himself seems to have been of an ambivalent opinion. In his (1921) book alone, next to positive assertions (e.g., “language and our thought- grooves are inextricably interwoven, [and] are, in a sense one and the same” (p. 217)), one finds definitely negative assessments: “language and culture are not intrinsically associated” (p. 213), “it is impossible to show that the form of a language has the slightest connection with national temperament” (p. 217), or “I [cannot] believe that culture and language are in any true sense causally related” (p. 218). (See fn. 6 below.) A similar example of hesitation can be found in Boas’ (1911) opinion. On the one hand, he says that “it does not seem likely... that there is any direct relation between the culture of a tribe and the language

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they speak,” but, on the other hand, he does not see any reason why “the form of the language will be molded by the state of culture,” though he allows for that “a certain state of culture is conditioned by morphological traits of the language” (p. 63). One solution to this paradox has been offered by Salzmann (2007, p. 50): “both Boas and Sapir had no doubt that the association of a particular culture, physical type (“race”), and language was not given by nature but was a historical coincidence.” So, while it remains true that there is no one-to-one correlation between a given type of culture and a given type of language, both culture and language are brought together in/by the history of a people, which invites mutual inferences, influences, and correspondences.

3. Language and culture: Relational Possibilities

In relating language and culture to each other, we face, in theory and in one way or another, the possibilities that can be identified in relating any two entities, phenomena, or objects, which we might call A and B. It may well be that (i) A and B are related symmetrically, that is they cross-influence each other, in the sense that there is as much of A in shaping B as of B in determining A. In practice, that means that language and culture are virtually one and the same thing, an indivisible whole, or that one cannot exist without the other. But it may also be that A and B are related asymmetrically, which somehow privileges one over the other: either A has pride of place over B, or B dominates A. A number of specific configurations can be envisaged here: one may stand for the other on a cause-and-effect basis (either A builds up B, or B facilitates A), one may precede the other on a temporal basis (either A originates for B to build upon, or B establishes itself for A to arise), one may embrace the other on an inclusion basis (either A includes B, or B includes A), etc. Finally, A and B may be claimed to remain unrelated, with no detected link, or association, however tangible, between the two. If we translate these four broad options into what can tentatively be expected of the language-culture relationship, we end up with the following schematic representations:

(i) language < > culture (symmetry) (ii) language > culture (linguistic imprint) (iii) language < culture (cultural imprint) (iv) ? > language culture < ? (no relation)

As the last option poses a question of further (other) factors that can be identified as motivating each of the two, the whole language-culture investigation

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would be, in fact, relegated outside of our interest here. We are thus left with three basic relational possibilities, marked as, respectively, (i) LG < > CL, (ii) LG > CL, and (iii) LG < CL. In more descriptive terms, the options are as follows:

(i) LG and CL are analogs (LG < > CL): the way we use language and the way we see/experience the world reflect each other; (ii) LG is a determinant of CL (LG > CL): the way we use language determines the way we see/experience the world; (iii) LG is a derivative of CL (LG < CL): the way we see/experience the world determines the way we use language.

Naturally, each of the three possible relations can be given a whole array of shades and degrees. For example, LG and CL can be analogous to each other (option (i) above) in different degrees in different cases. We make LG and CL analogs already by mere virtue of our using LG in reference to our common experience: what we experience in reality is what we refer to in language, and what we refer to in language is what we experience in reality. In this sense, wiosna, lato, jesień, zima (‘spring,’ summer,’ ‘autumn,’ ‘winter,’ respectively), the names we use in Polish for seasons of the year, reflect our culture, which is either our experiential sense of time flow with regard to changing conditions in the natural environment (the world of nature, that is), or our current knowledge of the sun-earth configuration, or both.4 Similarly, as long as we have four mental idealizations of how the natural environment keeps on changing in time, or of what radical configurations can be given to the sun-earth arrangement, our experience goes hand in hand with our linguistic expressions. Yet, at times this perfect mirror reflection seems to be lacking. For example, the way we divide the academic year in Polish is into just two halves, semestr zimowy ‘winter semester’ and semestr letni ‘summer semester.’ This in no way reflects these four idealizations of the seasons of the year mentioned above. In reality, semestr zimowy has to do with autumn as much as with winter (October- March), and semestr letni with winter and spring as much as with summer (mid February-September). The experience-language relationship is still less of a mirror-reflection if we allow for the fact that semestr zimowy ends up with sesja zimowa ‘winter examination session’ that extends until the end of March (re-sits included),

4 See Łozowski (2012) for how behind the Polish names of the months of the year we find the experiential inference of how changes in the natural world facilitate, force, or condition human activities. As we argue there, except marzec ‘March’ and maj ‘May,’ the remaining ten month-names reflect perceived changes in the natural world as well as human dependence on the changing natural environment.

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which experientially is considered to be already a spring month, whereas semestr letni concludes with sesja letnia ‘summer examination session’ that covers June and September (re-sits), two months quite divergent in experiential terms (neither is likely to be seen as summer proper, certainly not by Polish school children for whom September 1 marks the absolute and undesirable end of their summer). On top of that, consider przedwiośnie ‘early spring,’ babie lato ‘Indian summer,’ or złota polska jesień ‘Polish golden autumn.’ Despite their names, przedwiośnie has to do more with the prototypical winter (snow, frost, ice, low temperature) than with the prototypical spring (fresh grass, young leaves), babie lato may well project into October, and złota polska jesień usually starts already in September. Similarly, one can hardly speak of a language-culture mirror-reflection when it comes to changing car tires. Though Polish makes room for four different seasons of the year, we change opony zimowe ‘winter tires’ and opony letnie ‘summer tires’ only, as if we did not experience autumn and spring at all. Of course, we do, but we have not got anything like autumn tires and spring tires and, accordingly, we do not make use of the corresponding linguistic expressions opony jesienne and opony wiosenne. Autumn and spring seem to be side-tracked further on if we allow for letnie igrzyska olimpijskie ‘Summer Olympic Games’ and zimowe igrzyska olimpijskie ‘Winter Olympic Games,’ sporty zimowe ‘winter sports’ and sporty letnie ‘summer sports,’ wyprzedaż zimowa ‘winter sale’ and wyprzedaż letnia ‘summer sale,’ with no spring and autumn counterparts.5

4. Language and Culture: Relation Examples

It is not difficult to find specific advocates of each of the three language-culture relation options that we present above. The symmetry option is perhaps the hardest to attest. Bloomfield and Newmark’s (1963, p. 6; emphasis added) position that “language is not only a creation of society..., it is also a creator of society” seems isolated. The problem here is logical: as a social product, language comes into being to serve specific human needs (of which communication appears most obvious). Language is a tool, then, and its creative powers must necessarily be reduced to those of any other need-satisfying measure that serves some purpose. Humans may

5 As much as the language-culture symmetry may range from perfect mirror-reflection to mere overlap, in a similar fashion, linguistic imprint upon culture (option (ii) above) and, conversely, cultural imprint on language (option (iii) above), may, theoretically at least, vary from absolute to partial, from determinism to relativism.

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be dependent on the tools they use, but these tools will hardly ever stand for humans. In other words, humans will be humans even if deprived of their tools, no matter whether we take them to be fully-fledged creations, such as marriage, government, currency, or quasi-creations, such as inventions (gunpowder, steam engine, computer), or discoveries (America, penicillin, Higgs boson). None of these makes us human. We make them because we are human. This is possibly why by language as “a creator of society,” Bloomfield and Newmark mean the interpretative load in language, not of language, which, in fact, gives priority to society and its culture: “[one’s] sense of the world... depends to a great extent on the language [one] uses” (ibid.). Yes, it does, but only as far as our sense of the world has been written into our language, which makes the symmetry claim appear illusory. Asymmetrical ways of binding language and culture are far more frequently attested in the literature. A very good example of the one-sided influence of language upon culture emanates from Sapir (1933, here 1970, pp. 16, 19; emphasis added):

The essential perfection [of language] is a prerequisite to the development of culture as a whole. ... No matter how sophisticated our modes of interpretation become, we never really get beyond the projection and continuous transfer of relations suggested by [language].

Sapir would have many examples to show the validity and priority of linguistic considerations over cultural ones.6 On our reading of Sapir (1970 [1933]), this, in the first place, involves (i) linguistic analysis of experience, which is that language is heuristic (empirical, interpretative) in relation to culture. Mainly by means of abstraction and generalization, language interprets what we actually experience in the world. Without language, we would not know what we see, touch, or hear. The elephant example Sapir gives is meant to illustrate this point:

6 This seems to be true even if we allow for Hyme’s (1983, p. 160) warning that “Sapir’s view of the relation between language and culture... was a continuously changing one.” Though much might have changed in his views over the years, indeed, he did remain a formalist, and, as Vermeulen (2009, p. 241) argues, “in this formal sense language is complete in itself; this means for Sapir that language is an autonomous, irreducible, system” that can do without anything but its own self-regulating mechanism. Sapir could not possibly make it more explicit (and more controversial) when he wrote that “language is a guide to ‘social reality’,” by which he understood that “it powerfully conditions all our thinking about social problems and processes,” and that “human beings... are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society” (Sapir, 1929, p. 209).

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If a man who has never seen more than a single elephant in the course of his life nevertheless speaks without the slightest hesitation of ten elephants or a million elephants or a herd..., it is obvious that language has the power to analyze experience into theoretically dissociable elements and to create that world of the potentially intergrading with the actual... (Sapir, 1970 [1933], p. 19)

In other words, no matter what our actual experience is, we can, as Sapir continues, “transcend the immediately given in [our] individual experiences.” What is immediately given is having seen just one elephant (or, better, having seen no elephant at all), but with the ready-made means of interpretation like the English grammatical singular/plural distinction, we can speak not about an elephant, but about elephants, thus forcing us into developing a picture of the world that is adequate linguistically, but not very accurate experientially. If the end product of this transcending “the immediately given” into “a larger common understanding” we will call culture, as Sapir does, we must conclude that the way we think depends on the way we use language. Secondly, the elephant example also shows (ii) linguistic predetermination of experience. Our language tells us what it is that can be experienced at all, or is experienceable. Simply put, no matter whether we have seen any elephants at all, it is possible to experience one elephant, ten elephants, etc. But here Sapir would have a better example (ibid., p. 20):

The grass waves in the wind is shown by its linguistic form to be a member of the same relational class of experiences as The man works in the house.

With regard to their form, the two sentences are alike: both express a relation of agency (the grass waves vs. the man works) and a relation of location (in the wind vs. in the house), so both comply with the following pattern: somebody/something does something somewhere. In other words, linguistically, there is no difference between experiencing the grass waving in the wind and experiencing the man working in the house. Yet, experientially, the difference is rather crucial – despite the surface similarity, the relations that are experientially real in the grass waves in the wind are just opposite to those suggested by the form of the sentence: the agent is the wind, not the grass, and the location is the grass, not the wind. Thus are two different experiences given one and the same linguistic shape, which makes Sapir conclude that “language is at one and the same time helping and retarding us in our exploration of experience” (ibid.). Moreover, even if we express the experience encoded in the grass waves in the wind with a passive construction, the grass is waved by the wind, or a causative construction, the wind causes

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the grass to wave, these two may now more closely correspond to our actual experience of grass waving in the wind, but the relations remain the same, the grass being the location and the wind being the agent. As Sapir could possibly round it off, what humans experience must one way or another be subjected to the relations predetermined by the language we speak. We indeed cannot break free from “the projection and continuous transfer of relations suggested by the forms of our speech” (ibid.). The relations that we discover in language are what we discover in/about the world. Finally, the imprint language leaves on culture goes as far as (iii) a complete linguistic interpenetration of experience. In practice, this means that language is, in fact, a verbal substitution for experience.7 Sapir voices this idea as follows:

[L]anguage may not only refer to experience or even mold, interpret and discover experience but (…) it also substitutes for it in the sense that... speech and action supplement each other and do each other’s work (…). If one says to me Lend me a dollar, I may hand over the money without a word or I may give it with an accompanying here it is or I may say I haven’t got it. I’ll give it to you tomorrow. Each of these responses is structurally equivalent... (Sapir, 1970 [1933], p. 20)

Further evidence that Sapir finds for the claim that humans can do well without actually experiencing reality is, “among primitive people,” casting spells. This is based on the feeling of the “virtual reality or close correspondence of word and thing” (p. 19). Similarly, lovers of nature try hard to master the names of flowers and trees “as though the primary world of reality were a verbal one” (p. 20). If it is difficult, then, to tell language and experience apart, this is because “things, qualities and events are on the whole felt to be what they are called” (ibid.). Of more recent advocates of linguistic imprint upon experience, Traugott and Dasher (2002: 21, 30; emphasis added) give the language-culture interface a clear linguistic slant:

7 To let some of the (radical) Sapirians speak, Whorf claims that “language produces an organization of experience” (1936, p. 131) and that “the background linguistic system... is itself the shaper of ideas” (1940, p. 231); Witherspoon concludes that “language is not a mirror of reality; reality is a mirror of language” (1977, p. 34); and Lucy leaves no doubt as to the primacy of language (over culture and mind), saying that “[l]anguage provides the dominant medium for social interaction helping to enable the distinctive forms of organization that we call cultures. Likewise, it provides an important medium of psychological representation, helping to constitute the distinctive forms of thought we call mind” (2004, p. 1), or, in short, that “language patterns do affect cognitive performance” (1992, p. 158).

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Experience is largely determined by language... [P]erspectives and attitudes are constrained by the communicative world of the speech event, rather than by the so-called “real-world” characteristics of the event or situation referred to.

Traugott and Dasher drop this generalization while relating deontic and epistemic modalities on the grounds of invited inferencing. In a nutshell, “invited inference” is designed to be a theory of semantic change, where “the speaker/ writer (SP/W) evokes implicatures and invites the addressee/reader (AD/R) to infer them” (p. 5), with SP/W playing the central role “in rhetorical strategizing, indeed indexing and choreographing the communicative act” (ibid.). Here is a very brief report on just one example that shows why Traugott and Dasher are prepared to opt for language-determined experience (rather than experience- based language). According to Traugott and Dasher, as/so long as had both the spatial and temporal meanings side by side already in OE and MidE, as evidenced with (1) and (2) below:

(1) þa wæron fulneah tu swa lange swa ða oþru ‘they [the ships king Alfred ordered to be built] were almost twice as long as the other ships’

(2) wring þurh linenne clað on ðæt eage swa lange swa him þearf sy ‘squeeze (the medication) through a linen cloth onto the eye as long as he needs it’

With regard to (2), as the act of administering the medication is temporally coextensive with the need for the medication, this invites the inference of the conditional import ‘provided that’ (p. 36):

This is because the main clause is imperative, part of a set of procedures to be followed in imaginary situations; in such imaginary situations, the need is construed as contingent and temporary...

In other words, the conditional reading of swa lange swa in OE and MidE goes well with the fact that it appears primarily with the verbs that are construed as temporary (e.g., the verb of existence be). In (2), the gloss can now read this: “squeeze the medication on the eye for the length of time that he needs it/until he no longer needs it” (p. 37). Evidently, the development of so/as long as is that the progression spatial > spatial + temporary > temporary + conditional > conditional is not, in fact, a metaphorical chain, where new meanings are seen as extensions, elaborations,

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analogues, etc. of older meanings, but an inferential one, where new meanings appear as associations of older meanings. This is what Traugott and Dasher seem to confirm by saying that “SP/W exploits invited inferences innovatively in associative stream of speech” (p. 38). Now, human experience is clearly constrained by language in that it is possible only as far as it can be inferred from language. Taken to its logical extreme, all that we can experience is already built into linguistic structures, or, in other words, there is nothing we can experience that is not part of language. However central the role of SP/W in the process of inferencing is claimed to be, it proves secondary/relative to the language material of a given word/construction (note the import of the enigmatic “associative stream of speech”). In other words, it is not SP/W’s cognitive tensions that invite to be released in language, but language that invites cognitive tensions, or, for that matter, inferences. Should Traugott and Dasher allow for a metaphorical process here, SP/W’s inferences would be subject to his/her perceiving resemblance, spotting correspondences, building parallels, and, ultimately, translating one domain of human experience (e.g., space) into another (e.g., time) – instead of language shaping experience (and culture), we would have experience shaping language.8 The other version of the asymmetrical way of presenting the language- culture interface, with culture influencing language, can in the first place be found in Malinowski. There are several reasons why the direction he gives to the language-culture relationship favors culture, rather than language, each being a logical consequence of his overall stand on anthropology. The primary reason seems to be Malinowski’s (radically) functional and contextual research inclinations. For him, culture comes in response to human basic needs. In Richards’ (1957, p. 18) assessment, “rites, beliefs, and customs... actually fill ‘needs’, biological, psychological, and social.” Language, in turn, specifically comes in response to human need of action, which presents language as a pragmatic way of doing things, a way of accomplishing tasks, or, as Malinowski puts it, “a mode of behaviour, an indispensable element of concerted human action” (Malinowski, 1923, p. 316). More generally, “in every type of civilization, every custom, material object, idea and belief fulfills some vital function [and] has some task to accomplish” (Malinowski, 1926, p. 133). If so, there is always a reason that needs to be discovered, or an explanation that needs to be understood, for why a given piece of language is and means what it does.

8 This is quite unexpected as, after all, Traugott and Dasher “consider linguistic phenomena... so closely tied to cognitive and social factors as not to be self-contained” (2002, p. xi). For more, see Łozowski (2008, sections 3.3.5 and 3.4.2).

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Malinowski would take this assumption quite far: “[the] correlation between language and the uses to which it is put, has left its traces in linguistic structure” (1923, p. 327). It is not, then, that linguistic structures shape arbitrarily their own pragmatic applications, and, thus, leave their imprints on what he calls “social heritage” (1931, p. 621), but just the other way round. The same stems from his call for a new ethno-linguistic theory:

A theory which in linguistics would show us... how linguistic forms are influenced by physiological, mental, social, and other cultural elements; what is the real nature of meaning and form, and how they correspond... (Malinowski, 1920, p. 69; emphasis changed)

Again, culture influences language (not: language structures culture), linguistic form and linguistic substance correspond to each other (not: there is no direct link between form and substance), linguistic sign is motivated (not: arbitrary), and the sources of cultural grounding of language are as diverse and versatile as human biology, human ways of thinking, social organization, etc. Still, probably the best single excerpt from Malinowski’s writings on what direction he would give to the language-culture interface is this:

Real categories there are, on which the grammatical divisions are based and molded. But these real categories are not derived from any primitive philosophical system, built up by contemplation of the surrounding world and by crude speculations... Language in its structure mirrors the real categories derived from practical attitudes of the child and of primitive or natural man to the surrounding world. The grammatical categories with all their peculiarities, exceptions, and refractory insubordination to rule, are the reflection of the makeshift, unsystematic, practical outlook imposed by man’s struggle for existence in the widest sense of the word. (Malinowski, 1923, p. 297; emphasis added)

This is where we find truly convincing evidence to claim that Malinowski would view language as a derivative of man’s cultural grounding: language is “based,” “molded,” “derived,” language “mirrors,” and its categories “are the reflections.” What language looks like and what it stands for is a direct consequence of man’s way of thinking (“attitudes,” “outlook”) that, in turn, is conditioned by man’s experience (“struggle for existence”). This explains Malinowski’s zealous research appeal: “we have to study the man, and we must study what concerns him most intimately, that is, the hold which life has on him” (1922, p. 24). We, thus, obtain the following picture of the language-culture interface: while struggling for existence, one develops a sense of the world, a set of experience-

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driven conceptualizations that may, but do not have to, ultimately find their way into, among other things, one’s language. Now, the question arises as to which of these – (i) LG < > CL, (ii) LG > CL, (iii) LG < CL – can be ascribed to Bartmiński’s cognitive ethnolinguistics? While relating language and culture, does he favor symmetry or asymmetry? If the latter, should his program be given the Sapirian/Whorfian (LG > CL) label, or should it rather be ascribed to the Malinowskian (LG < CL) slant?

5. Language and culture: ACE (2009/2012)

To start with, the very name, i.e. cognitive ethnolinguistics, may well suggest that the program is Malinowskian in its nature. After all, very much like Malinowski’s anthropology, cognitive linguistics is a branch of functionalism, too. Accordingly, cognitivists claim that the language we speak is shaped by our experiential make-up, by what we specifically and actually are as speakers, which amounts to saying that language is motivated and experience-based. (See Langacker (2008, pp. 1-4, 10) quoted at the end of Section 2.) In fact, Bartmiński’s position is far more complex and escapes easy generalizations. On the one hand, he claims that “culture exists in language and constitutes its inalienable component” (ACE, p. 9). As we understand, language is a whole built of many components, one of which is culture. This privileges language over culture. No matter how important, central, and indispensable culture may be for the rise and development of language, it anyway is merely one of many “inalienable” components. Bartmiński does not name these other components (natural environment? genetic make-up? history?), yet the language-culture relationship can safely be presented as in Figure 19.1.

LANGUAGE ? ? ? ? culture ? ? ? ?

Fig. 19.1 Culture as a component of language – cf. Bartmiński (2009/2012, p. 9).

On the other hand, however, Bartmiński says this: “as an aspect of culture, language is a semiotic system, together with literature, art, religion, custom and myth” (p. 12). This time the all-embracing whole is culture, with language being just one of its aspects (some other aspects overtly named by Bartmiński himself). It may well be the most important, salient, or constitutive of all the aspects of culture, but its effect is heavily curtailed by the fact that there are anyway quite

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a few more that culture cannot do without. This time, the language-culture relationship looks as in Figure 19.2.

CULTURE ? art ? custom language religion ? myth literature

Fig. 19.2 Language as an aspect of culture – cf. Bartmiński (2009/2012, p. 12)

So, in Bartmiński’s program there seem to be two conflicting and/or complementary methodological inclinations, each given a divergent, if not opposite, research orientation. If we assume that culture is a component of language, we opt for some version of the LG > CL slant, where language facilitates culture, whereas if we allow that language is an aspect of culture, we go for the CL > LG tack, where language is facilitated by culture. Here is some more evidence that Bartmiński, indeed, intends to make use of both of them in a mutual interpenetration that is difficult to come to terms with. While sketching the general aims of ethnolinguistics, Bartmiński has this to say:

Ethnolinguistics deals with manifestations of culture in language. It investigates linguistic structure in relation to the history and culture of specific communities, especially with the mentality of the group, its behaviours and value system. It attempts to discover the traces of culture in the very fabric of language, in word meanings, phraseology, word formation, syntax and text structure. (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 10)

While this confirms that Bartmiński is by no means prepared to claim language and culture unrelated, the direction he would take favors language. Naturally, these “traces of culture in the very fabric of language” may vary from patchwork through some leitmotif-like golden thread (another possible thread being “the history... of specific communities”) to mere isolated ornaments or marginalized fringes, but it is language that sways the scepter, with culture having been reduced to “manifestations.” In other words, intentionally or not, Bartmiński allows for the situation when whole stretches of “the very fabric of language” can appear unaffected by, immune to, or left intact by any of the cultural manifestations he mentions, such as “the mentality of the group, its behaviours and value system” (ibid.). Bartmiński could not possibly make it clearer while concluding his program with this: “It poses questions about the manifestations of culture in language,

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not about the position and role of language in culture” (p. 11). If isolated, this credo could qualify as the CL > LG orientation, but in the light of the preceding paragraph, it must be taken as an invitation to follow the opposite line (LG > CL), that is not to challenge the linguistic imprint upon culture, whatever the reason for that can be, but to try and show that culture has got anything to say on language. Still, on its face value, this culture-friendly attitude (“it poses questions about the manifestations of culture in language, not about the position and role of language in culture”) makes an impression of an unbalanced relationship between language and culture, with the latter being somehow superior, at least as a research object, to language. Bartmiński seems to be aware of this easy possibility of misreading and misinterpreting his intentions, which is why he hastens to add that

The relationship between them is not that of subordination because language may be treated as an aspect or repository of culture, something that embraces, expresses and gives breath to culture. (p. 12)

To make his position even more complex, if not complicated, he does not mind taking the role of language in culture even further: “language conditions culture, for without it one cannot participate in culture or in social life, even in their crudest forms” (p. 12), which is a typically Sapirian point of view. So, with regard to the question of directionality in the language-culture interface, there seems to be a methodological tension, dilemma, or even a conflict written, rather explicitly, into Bartmiński’s methodology. This at least is the conclusion that one must arrive at, having read closely some of his theoretical premises and tenets in ACE (2009/2012). The best we can probably do, under the circumstances, is to assume, after Zinken (2009/2012), that, on the whole, Bartmiński’s way of doing ethnolinguistics does have, in the end, a cultural orientation, and this cultural orientation

has ramifications for the understanding of some important cognitive linguistic concepts. One of these is the concept of experience, or the ‘experiential frame’... In Bartmiński’s work, it is not only an individual’s “first hand” experience that enters [the] experiential frame, but also experience entrenched in “social memory”... The individual always experiences a culturally meaningful environment – an environment in which salient objects can be intangible (the telling of a narrative) or “concrete” (moving around in one’s home). (p. 4)

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In other words, in the context of Bartmiński’s research, the language-culture issue does not depend on the directionality question – if language and culture are closely interrelated (as they actually are for Bartmiński), this is not because of their mutual interpenetration, i.e. not because one facilitates, structures, or conditions the other. However primary methodologically, this is not a relevant inquiry here. Instead, the pertinent question now becomes what is this third party that brings language and culture together. In that respect, as already implied by Zinken above, Bartmiński’s answer is exceptionally straightforward:

[T]he third inalienable element is the human subject, the experiencing and acting individual, a person, but also a community... But humans, as individuals and as communities, ... represent and cherish values. Values are always linked to a subject, they are values “for someone”. ... Values bridge language and culture. They lie at the core of culture; they constitute the very foundation of language... (p. 12; emphasis added)

If we attempted a mnemonic representation of the language-culture interface according to Bartmiński, this could look like this: language < > homo loquens (values) < > culture, which gives priority to and is centered upon the human factor, individual or collective. As Bartmiński would continue,

[my ethnolinguistics] strives to reconstruct the worldview entrenched in language as it is projected by the experiencing and speaking subject, homo loquens... The ultimate aim has always been to arrive at the speaking subject, homo loquens, his perception and conceptualisation of the world, mentality and value system. (pp. 10, 11)

The mediatory conception of homo loquens, indeed, eases some of the tension with regard to the language-culture relationship, but it all the same invites the directionality question to strike back: true, humans cherish values, but where do these values come from? From experiencing culture or from experiencing language?

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References

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (2009/2012). Aspects of Cognitive Ethnolinguistics. Ed. Jörg Zinken. Sheffield and Oakville, CT: Equinox.

Bloomfield, Morton W., Newmark, Leonard. (1963).A Linguistic Introduction to the History of English. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Boas, Franz. (1911). Handbook of American Indian Languages. Part 1. Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 40. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.

Bréal, Michel. (1897). Essai de semantique: science des significations. Paris: Hachette.

Geeraerts, Dirk. (2010). Theories of Lexical Semantics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hymes, Dell H. (1983). Linguistic method in ethnography: its developments in the United States. In Essays in the History of Linguistic Anthropology (pp. 135- 244). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Langacker, Ronald W. (2008). Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lucy, John A. (1992). Grammatical Categories and Cognition: A Case Study of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Łozowski, Przemyslaw. (2008). Language as Symbol of Experience: King Alfred’s cunnan, magan, and motan in a Panchronic Perspective. Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

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Łozowski, Przemyslaw. (2012). Experience behind language: panchronic motivation behind Polish names of the months. In Eugeniusz Cyran, Henryk Kardela, & Bogdan Szymanek (Eds.), Sound, Structure and Sense. Studies in Memory of Edmund Gussmann (pp. 407-420). Lublin: Wydawnictwo KUL.

Malinowski, Bronislaw. (1920). Classificatory particles in the language of Kiriwina. Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies, Vol. I, Part IV: 33-78.

Malinowski, Bronislaw. (1922). Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Malinowski, Bronislaw. (1923). The problem of meaning in primitive languages. In C. K. Ogden & I. A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning. Supplement I (pp. 296- 336). London: Kegan Paul.

Malinowski, Bronislaw. (1926). Anthropology. In Encyclopedia Britannica, 13th edition, Sup. Vol. 1 (pp. 131-140). Benton.

Malinowski, Bronislaw. (1931). Culture. In Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Vol. 4 (pp. 621-646). Macmillan.

Narrog, Heiko. (2010). (Inter)subjectification in the domain of modality and mood – Concepts and cross-linguistic realities. In Kristin Davidse, Lieven Vandelanote, & Hubert Cuyckens (Eds.), Subjectification, Intersubjectification and Grammaticalization (pp. 385-429). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.

Richards, Ivor Armstrong. (1957). The concept of culture in Malinowski’s work. In J. R. Firth (Ed.), Man and Culture – an Evaluation of the Work of Bronislaw Malinowski. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Salzmann, Zdenek. (2007). Language, Culture, and Society. An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology. 4th edition. Boulder, Coolorado, and Oxford: Westview Press.

Sapir, Edward. (1921). Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech. New York: Harcourt, Brace.

Sapir Edward. (1929). The status of linguistics as a science. Language, 5, 207- 214.

Sapir, Edward. (1970 [1933]). Language. In Harold Hungerford, Jay L. Robinson, & James Sledd (Eds.), English Linguistics. An Introductory Reader (pp. 15-38). Glenview: Scott, Foresman and Company.

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Saussure, Ferdinand de. (1983 [1916]). Course in General Linguistics. Translated and annotated by Roy Harris. London: Duckworth.

Traugott, Elizabeth, & Dasher, Richard B. (2002). Regularity in Semantic Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Vermeulen, Jeroen. (2009). Edward Sapir. In Gunter Senft, Jan-Ola Östman, & Jef Verschueren (eds.), Culture and Language Use (pp. 234-247). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Whorf, Benjamin L. (1936). The punctual and segmentative aspects of verbs in Hopi. Language, 12, 127-131.

Whorf, Benjamin L. (1940). Science and linguistics. Technology Review, 42, 229- 248.

Witherspoon, Gary. (1977). Language and Art in the Navajo Universe. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Wierzbicka, Anna. (1997). Understanding Cultures through Their Key Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Zinken, Jörg. (2009/2012). The Ethnolinguistic School of Lublin and Anglo- American cognitive linguistics. In Jerzy Bartmiński. Aspects of Cognitive Ethnolinguistics. 1-5. Sheffield and Oakville, CT: Equinox.

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Chapter 20 Viewpoint and cognitive distance

Adam Głaz UMCS, Lublin, Poland

1. Viewpoint and perspective in the linguistic worldview idea

Bartmiński (2009/2012, p. 76) distinguishes two variants of the linguistic worldview: subject-related (vision/view of the world) and object-related (picture of the world, cf. German das Sprachliche Weltbild). In both variants, an important role is assigned to the category of viewpoint/point of view1 (any kind of picture is necessarily someone’s picture constructed form a given position), although not surprisingly it figures more prominently in the former, subject- oriented view, which essentially pertains to how the world is portrayed by (a) language speaker(s). Viewpoint is treated as a subjective and culture-related factor decisive in categorizing an object with regard to both what it is and how it is being talked about (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 77). Moreover, despite its common-sense identity with perspective, the latter is defined as “a set of properties of the semantic structure of words” and depends on viewpoint “at least to a certain extent” (p. 78). In order to see the correlation between viewpoint and perspective, let us mention Bartmiński’s (pp. 78-79) example of the various Polish names for the pupil of the eye. The author distinguishes three viewpoints for naming the object: anatomical-perceptual (what it looks like, how it is built), functional (what it is used for), and communicative socio-cultural (what happens to the pupils when people engage in face-to-face interaction). The anatomical-perceptual basis is the oldest and the most objective: it is present in the Old Polish term zienica, derived from ziać, ziewać ‘open.’2 The functional viewpoint can be recognized in the standard Polish term źrenica, semantically motivated by the verb spojrzeć

1 The two terms will here be treated as synonymous stylistic variants of the same notion. Other terms, such as vantage point, will also be mentioned when quoting relevant authors. 2 In present-day Polish, ziewać is only used in the sense ‘yawn,’ while ziać means ‘pant (from effort)’ or is found in a handful of relatively stable collocations, e.g. ziać pustką ‘be empty,’ ziać gniewem ‘be seething with anger,’ or ziać ogniem ‘belch fire.’

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(perf.)/spozierać (imperf.) ‘look, take a look,’ as well as peasant dialectal terms patrzydło, patrzydełko ‘that which one uses for looking,’ from patrzeć ‘look.’ Finally, the communicative socio-cultural viewpoint yields a range of other peasant dialectal terms: panienka ‘little girl,’ lalka ‘doll,’ człowieczek ‘little man’ – they allude to what one can see in one’s interlocutor’s pupils during a conversation. In Kashubia, a region in northern Poland, the term is pupka, from German Puppe ‘doll.’ The English pupil can obviously be attributed to the workings of the same viewpoint, from Old French pupille, and that from Latin pūpilla ‘little doll, pupil of the eye.’3 But how does this relate to perspective? This is best seen while considering the treatment that the words for the pupil receive in lexicography. As an example (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, pp. 80-81), consider the definition of the standard Polish źrenica (recall: from spojrzeć (perf.)/spozierać (imperf.) ‘look, take a look’) offered in a very influential, though now largely outdated, Doroszewski’s dictionary of Polish (SJPDor, 1958-1969): “a round opening in the eye’s iris, whose function is to regulate the flow of light to optic nerve endings” (vol. 10, 1968) [transl. A.G.]. Two viewpoints contribute to this definition: anatomical-perceptual (a round opening, iris, optic nerve endings) and functional (to regulate the flow of light). The two viewpoints together contribute to the scientific portrait of the pupil that the definition represents: this is perspective, which Bartmiński technically defines as “a set of properties of the semantic structure” of a word (2009/2012, p. 78). In that sense, perspective depends on viewpoint but also “various viewpoints may emerge within it” (p. 82).4 Perspective is thus a richer and a more comprehensive notion than viewpoint in that it involves a certain configuration of the properties of a given object and a body of information about it. Should the speaker choose to concentrate on other aspects of the pupil, the resultant perspective may be a colloquial one; for example, in Doroszewski’s definition there is no reference to the fact that the pupil is treated as the most important part of the eye, guarded and protected (cf. strzec jak źrenicy oka ‘to guard like the apple (lit. pupil) of one’s eye’).

3 The same etymological basis also figures in pupa, puppet, and pupil ‘young student’: they involve, to various degrees and in various configurations, the notions of being small, underdeveloped, and therefore easily controlled (Latin pūpa ‘girl, doll,’ pūpus ‘child,’ pupillus ‘orphan’). Motivations and viewpoints crisscross and clash; for more on the etymological relatedness of the two senses of pupil cf. Etymonline (2001-2012), CODEE (1986, p. 378) or Łozowski (2000, pp. 78-81). 4 The limitations and a somewhat different focus of this chapter do not allow me to devote attention to the co-occurrence of several viewpoints within the same speaking subject, a phenomenon frequently underscored by Bartmiński. A fuller account of viewpoint would also have to relate to other dimensions of the linguistic worldview, notably the notion of profiling (cf. Bartmiński, 2009/2012, chapter 8, but also 4, 13, and 15).

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In proposing this kind of relationship between viewpoint and perspective, Bartmiński unintentionally aligns his model with Langacker’s dimensions of construal (2008, chapter 3). These include specificity vs. schematicity, focusing, salience, and perspective (each subsuming several more fine-grained distinctions). Perspective is “the viewing arrangement, the most obvious aspect of which is the vantage point assumed” (p. 73). In a purely topographical understanding, vantage point is the location of the speaker and hearer but obviously it need not be such for linguistic purposes (pp. 75-76). Crucially, “[m]any expressions undeniably invoke a vantage point as part of their meaning (arguably, all expressions do)” (p. 75), and the “capacity to fictively adopt ... a non- actual vantage point enables us to describe a situation from the perspective of the hearer or some other individual” (p. 76). Thus, both Bartmiński and Langacker note that the adoption of a particular vantage point/viewpoint is a fundamental cognitive (and, in consequence, linguistic) ability of speakers and that doing so facilitates a construction of perspective as a fuller, more comprehensive portrayal of an object or scene.5 One of the easily noticeable differences between Bartmiński’s and Langacker’s approaches is the former’s clearer focus on the cultural aspects of viewpoint and perspective, and the latter’s more detailed perceptual grounding. Both authors are well aware of the fact that the very terms viewpoint, point of view, vantage point, and perspective (as well as standpoint and outlook) have metaphorical bases and derive from human perceptual abilities,6 but the ethnolinguistic commitment in Bartmiński’s research program naturally predisposes the scholar to seek anthropologically-oriented extensions of the metaphor. Thus, in contrast to Langacker’s technically more detailed descriptive apparatus derived from the findings of cognitive psychology, Bartmiński constructs his model by analyzing language. Chapter 9 of his 2009/2012 book is an attempt to uncover the linguistic portrait of SEEING (Pol. WIDZENIE) as it is entrenched in contemporary standard Polish.7 In the remainder of the present chapter I will capitalize on this attempt and propose to operationalize the notions of viewpoint and perspective (parameters of SEEING) for the purpose of linguistic analysis.

5 In his earlier work (e.g. 1991), Langacker proposed a somewhat different set of dimensions of construal but the perspective-vantage point relationship was basically the same. Cf. also Tabakowska’s (2004, p. 702) comment: “In fact, all dimensions of imagery as they appear in cognitivist literature are ultimately the function of POV [point of view, A.G.].” 6 Cf. Tabakowska (2004) for a discussion of these terminological variants. 7 The chapter is based on a co-authored article originally published in Polish (Bartmiński & Niebrzegowska-Bartmińska, 2004).

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2. Viewpoint and perspective in the concept of SEEING

Bartmiński identifies the parameters of the concept of SEEING (Pol. WIDZENIE) in contemporary standard Polish “on the basis of linguistic data alone” (2009/2012, p. 99). The parameters are thus not theoretical constructs to be used in analyses and are not claimed to have a universal nature. With this proviso in mind, let us nevertheless remember that seeing, understanding, and interpreting what one sees are perceptual and cognitive processes common to all healthy human beings: it is therefore perhaps justifiable to ask whether these parameters constitute a coherent system and whether they can be operationalized for analytic purposes. Regardless of final answers to these questions, if such indeed can be proposed, putting Bartmiński’s findings to the test will facilitate the introduction of certain fine-grained distinctions not only to our construal of the internally complex concept of SEEING but also to the application of the metaphors of viewpoint and perspective, components of that concept, to analysis of language use. Bartmiński identifies the following parameters of the linguistic portrait of SEEING in contemporary standard Polish (i.e. a non-scientific portrait): the act of seeing, the subject of seeing, the object of seeing, viewpoint, observation point, perspective, the angle of seeing, the field of vision, directionality, the line of sight, the organ and aids to seeing, visibility, the planes of seeing (foreground vs. background). A mere listing of the parameters does not do justice to the systemic relationships between them. Two kinds of relationships are especially underscored: (i) between the physical point of observation and the mental or ideological viewpoint, and (ii) between observation point, viewpoint, and perspective. Observation point and viewpoint are hub points in the system in that they link the subject, the act, and the object of seeing. Observation point may – but does not need to – coincide with viewpoint. Perspective, as has already been said, encompasses both observation point and viewpoint; additionally, it encompasses the line of sight, the angle of seeing (“the positioning of the line of sight relative to the subject-object line” (Bartmiński & Niebrzegowska- Bartmińska, 2004, p. 321)),8 field of vision, and directionality. It appears, therefore, that these parameters can be represented in the manner shown in Figure 20.1.

8 Interestingly, Kuno & Kaburaki (1977; cf. also Tabakowska, 2004, pp. 695-696) use the term camera angle to model the differences in viewpoints.

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Hmmm, let’s see...

Fig. 20.1 Perspective and its parameters: subject of seeing, object of seeing, observation point, viewpoint, line of sight, angle of seeing, field of vision, directionality

The human figure and the star are obviously the subject and the object of seeing, respectively, linked by broken line. The oval is the field of vision (a schematic representation, not exactly what it is in reality). The arrow represents the directional act of seeing, along a certain line of sight. If the line of sight does not coincide with the subject-object line, the angle of seeing is non-zero. The act is performed from a given observation point, i.e. the actual location of the viewer, while the viewpoint is his or her mental approach to the scene. The remaining parameters of the organ of sight, aids to seeing, seeing planes, and visibility complement the picture so we arrive at the graphic rendering of the concept of SEEING, as shown in Figure 20.2.

Hmmm, let’s see...

Foreground

Background Distant Planes

Fig. 20.2 The structure of the concept of SEEING (Pol. WIDZENIE) according to Bartmiński

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The organ of sight are the eyes (merely implied in the picture), the (optional) aid to seeing is the spyglass, and the shading represents visibility (diminishing with distance). The figure necessarily simplifies what is an interlaced networks of mutual dependencies, contingencies, and intersections.9

3. Distance: the missing link?

My question at this juncture is the following: what may be the usefulness of these parameters of SEEING, if any, as descriptive constructs in identifying and interpreting observation points, viewpoints, and perspectives in language use? Does the system help the analyst? It indeed seems to, but some of its elements may benefit from a more precise specification or in fact a greater attention. A parameter of this kind is distance, mentioned above in connection with visibility but not overtly marked in Figure 20.2. Admittedly, Bartmiński does mention closer or more distant location of objects in the field of vision or in connection with the foreground, background, or more distant planes of seeing (2009/2012, p. 106);10 he also invokes the notion of mental distance in valuation (p. 46), linguistic stereotyping (p. 181), or poetry (pp. 113-114). Yet, distance is not explicitly listed with the parameters of seeing: apparently the Polish language data do not warrant its inclusion there. One may certainly trust Bartmiński on this score, but I propose that the parameter of distance be incorporated into the system if the latter is to serve well in analysis of language use (and I also propose that it should). For this purpose, considerations of the physical realm of seeing should be extended onto conceptualization. Thus, the notions of distance and planes of seeing can and should be made more precise. Attention should be paid to the mental distance between the viewer (henceforth also: conceptualizer) and the object of conceptualization, as well as to the distance between the objects being conceptualized. I will propose to distinguish these processes from the notions of foreground vs. background and the figure-ground alignment. Specifically, I will claim that Bartmiński’s

9 One may compare this proposal with Tabakowska’s (2004) account of the theoretical and descriptive notions of viewpoint, perspective and many related ones. Yet, she leaves the reader a little confused as to whether it is perspective or viewpoint that plays the major role in her account, i.e. whether the following are aspects of one or the other: (1) WHO IS LOOKING – (2) FORM WHAT LOCUS – (3) WHAT IS SEEN – HOW IT IS SEEN – (5) HOW IT IS EXPRESSED – (6) HOW IT IS UNDERSTOOD (p. 701). 10 Cf. Talmy’s (2000, vol. 1, p. 70) perspectival distance and a distal, medial, or proximal perspective point (the author’s term for viewpoint) within it. Talmy defines perspective as a schematic system which “establishes a conceptual perspective point from which the entity is cognitively regarded” (vol. 1, p. 68) and offers a thorough discussion of those notions. Other frameworks, such as Mental Spaces Theory, make extensive use of the notion of viewpoint (viewpoint space) but not perspective (cf. e.g. Sweetser & Fauconnier, 1996).

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understanding of background as that which in the field of vision is located further than the object of seeing is insufficient. My proposal is based on an analysis of a fragment of written discourse, an excerpt from Wojciech Cejrowski’s (2006) Rio Anaconda. (The fact that meanings are lost in translation is negligible for the purpose of this study.)

When I got off the bus in Yopal [Colombia, A.G.], took outmy camera and started taking pictures, a guy came up to me, gently plucked my elbow and whispered right into my ear: “Careful with that camera, gringo. There’s a lot of people around here who don’t wanna be in your pictures.” “But I’m just shooting the marketplace, not anyone in particular.” “No matter. Lots of these guys’d rather not have faces. Or have different ones. Go to the police station and you easily get wanted notices for a half of Yopal.” “Gee, perhaps I should put my camera away, then.” “Too late now. Open it up so everyone can see. Take the film out and throw it away. Right in front of everyone’s eyes, gringo!” The stranger turned back and disappeared in the crowd. Around me the regular life of a small town was rolling along at its own pace: peddlers continued to sell things, passers-by were going about their daily business, people were waiting for the bus... But above it all there hung an unhealthy silence, as if someone had reached out for a remote and switched off the sound. No-one was looking at me and yet I had the impression that everyone was watching. It was still crowded, as it usually is at bus depots, but there was quite a lot of room around me: a telling void. And that silence... Sticky and heavy. I only wish it doesn’t turn out deadly, I thought. “Easy, gringo,” I heard behind my back. I turned back abruptly. A few steps away I saw a smiling policeman, leaning against a poster pillar. “Not to worry; just ditch that film and put the camera back.” Which I did. I ditched. I put back. My hands were shaking. A moment later I realized that sound was back on: peddlers were praising their stuff noisily, passers-by were greeting one another loud, some folks were listening to cassette players... No-one was paying attention. I was even jostled a few times by passengers heading for the bus. (Cejrowski, 2006, pp. 69-70; translation and emphasis A.G.)

In the emphasized fragment, there are two oppositions or even contradictions: no-one was looking – everybody was watching and crowded – a lot of room. There

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are also metaphors and blended spaces: a telling void, sticky and heavy silence. These result from physical aspects of seeing (point of observation, field of vision, line of sight, and directionality) merging with aspects of conceptualization: judgments made by the speaker from his physical but also social position, relative to other people (passengers waiting for the bus, the stranger, the policeman). The oppositions and contradictions can be modeled in terms of cognitive distance. The relationship between the scene’s participants is such that the narrator does not only do the looking (Fig. 20.3) but is also being observed by others (I had the impression that everyone was watching; Fig. 20.4).

Fig. 20.3 The narrator’s perspective in Cejrowski (2006, pp. 69-70)

Fig. 20.4 The crowd’s perspective and angle of seeing in Cejrowski (2006, pp. 69-70)

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In the latter case, the observation point is multiplied and dispersed, with the reversed direction of the act of looking/seeing. Importantly, there is a difference between “open,” overt observation performed by the narrator and “covert,” hidden observation that the narrator “feels” is taking place (I had the impression). The impression that no one seems to be looking and yet everyone is watching arises because the Yopal people cast clandestine glances at an angle: they pretend not to be looking (the line of sight does not coincide with the subject-object line) and yet they are (the line of sight is active and directional). Within the narrator, who is now the object of seeing but also a conceptualizer, there arises a distinction between his physical locus, i.e. observation point, and his judgment of the situation, i.e. viewpoint. It is because he can override the physicality of the scene with intuitive judgment that he records the surreptitious glances. Yet, the crucial parameter that I would like to focus on is that of distance in relation to seeing planes and the figure-ground alignment. Several planes can be identified: the void around the narrator may be the foreground, while the crowd a certain distance away is the background. But either of the two may be the figure relative to the other as the ground, for it is certainly not thecase that the foreground is by definition the figure. Rather, the figure is the focus of attention and it frequently is but need not be in the foreground. When traveling on a train, one may focus on the relatively close elements of the landscape flashing by in the opposite direction but also on the more distant elements which seem to “travel” in the same direction as the train: these are now in focus against the background of the closer objects. In the passage at hand, attention is directed, interchangeably, at the foreground (the crowd at the depot) and the background (the void next to the narrator). In agreement with the requirements of cognitive psychology for the figure-ground alignment, a figure needs a ground to be one: the void around the narrator contrasts with the crowd (and is thus a figure) but also the reverse! Foreground and background are thus physical constructs defined relative to the observation point and do not directly translate as cognitive figure-vs.-ground in a one-to-one fashion. A brief synopsis of findings will perhaps be useful at this point. One can propose a few carefully wrought distinctions: 1. Distance is an originally physical parameter of seeing but also a cognitive parameter of conceptualization: the two domains are related but the specifications of the former may be overridden by the latter. 2. Planes are regions within the field of vision dependent on the distance between the viewer and the viewed (foreground, background, more distant planes). 3. There is no direct correlation between (physical) planes and the (cognitive) figure-ground alignment: the figure need not be located in the physical foreground but it is in the cognitive focus of attention.

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Below I will also discuss another aspect of distance, namely its operation in two realms: (i) between the conceptualizer and the object of conceptualization, and (ii) between the conceptualized elements in the field of vision/ conceptualization. I will consider these issues while seeking a deeper cognitive motivation for distance.

4. Cognitive motivation for distance

How does distance arise? What causes it to contract or protract? The driving force may be sought in the fundamental human cognitive ability to perceive and conceive of similarities or differences between the objects of conceptualization.11 Emphasis on similarity results in contraction of cognitive distance between the objects, more of which fit into the field of vision. It also contracts the distance between the one who performs the act of seeing/conceptualization and the entity that undergoes it. Emphasis on difference protracts the distance in both dimensions: between the objects of conceptualization, as well as between the conceptualizer and the conceptualized (cf. MacLaury, 2000).12 In simple terms, the fewer differences there are between us, the closer we are to one another, while more differences make us drift apart. How does this relate to the excerpt we are considering? There is a clear distinction between “me” (the narrator) and “them” (the people at the marketplace and the bus depot). The distance has grown as a result of the difference between the two sides caused by the use of the camera. The camera, not so much an aid to seeing as an instrument that transforms and perhaps distorts a scene at the same time that it captures it, constitutes a causal link between the narrator’s actions (started taking pictures) and judgments (a telling void, sticky and heavy silence). But the protraction of the distance between the narrator and the other participants in the scene contrasts with the contraction of the distance between those participants: the people are viewed as a homogenous crowd reacting in

11 Of the myriad of authors who have recognized the importance of similarity for the way we organize the conceptual world around us, I will only mention a few. For Hume (1975 [1739-1740], p. 662), similarity (his term: resemblance) is a natural operation of the mind, a principle of connection (along with contiguity and cause and effect) that links ideas (cf. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume/). It is an elementary law for J. S. Mill (1843), an elementary relation (similarity vs. difference) for William James (1950 [1890], p. 688), an epistemologically primitive relation for Carnap (1967 [1928]). Among the more recent authors, Tversky (1977), Heil (2003), or Gärdenfors (2005) view judgments of similarity as fundamental to human cognitive functioning. 12 Emphases on similarity vs. difference, together with the effects they produce, constitute the backbone of MacLaury’s (1995, 1997, 2000, 2002) Vantage Theory, a model of categorization.

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a non-individualistic manner. Then, when the camera is put away, the distance between the narrator and the crowd contracts both in the physical and mental sense: no-one was paying attention (mental closeness), I was even jostled a few times by passengers heading for the bus (physical closeness). At the same time, the crowd continues to act in a non-individualized and homogeneous fashion: sound was back on: peddlers were praising their stuff noisily, passers-by were greeting one another loud, some folks were listening to cassette players.... Does it all take place in the foreground, background, or some more distant plane? That, in fact, is essentially irrelevant: the planes are merged into one field of vision and at the end of the scene the narrator and the crowd also merge into a single homogeneity.

5. Conclusions

No far-fetched conclusions are obviously justified on the basis of a single, rather short passage; I will, then, only list them as proposals for further consideration and testing. First, it appears that the dimensions or parameters of SEEING identified by Bartmiński acquit themselves well as descriptive constructs, although they have been extracted from linguistic manifestations of the Polish concept for non-operational purposes. Despite the possibly different linguistic portraits of the act of seeing, it is, in essence, physiologically and cognitively the same for human beings worldwide. Second, having said that, the parameters may and should be rendered more precise and the parameter of distance (physical but ultimately and predominantly cognitive) should be recognized with greater clarity.13 Distance is of prime importance in two realms: (i) between the subject and objects of conceptualization, and (ii) between the objects of conceptualization themselves, if more than one. Third, distance is related to but distinct from (i) the segmentation of the field of vision into planes of seeing, and (ii) the figure-ground alignment of the scene’s elements. Nor is there any direct and necessary correlation between the planes

13 It is interesting that distance is also somewhat hidden in Langacker’s (2008) dimensions of construal, notably his specificity vs. schematicity cline (also called granularity or resolution), as in the glass with water in it (more specific) vs. the container with liquid in it (more schematic) (p. 43). The former description obviously stems from viewing the glass from a closer (cognitive) distance than in the latter case. Distance is also correlated with the notions of objectivity vs. subjectivity: a viewing frame is subjectively constant but depending on the distance it may “subtend a region of virtually any (objective) size,” e.g. when viewing a distant mountain range vs. a painting from close up (p. 63).

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of seeing (notably the foreground and background) and the notions of figure vs. ground. It appears, then, that distance, planes of seeing, and figure-vs.-ground are interlaced but distinct constructs. Fourth, cognitive distance is anchored in more fundamental human cognitive processes as a function of perceiving and/or emphasizing similarities or differences by the conceptualizing subject. One can only hope that, if and when these observations are incorporated into Bartmiński’s linguistic worldview idea, the latter will advance even more in analytic precision.

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References

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (2009/2012). Aspects of Cognitive Ethnolinguistics. Ed. Jörg Zinken. Sheffield and Oakville, CT: Equinox.

Bartmiński, Jerzy, & Niebrzegowska-Bartmińska, Stanisława. (2004). Dynamika punktu widzenia w języku, tekście i dyskursie. In Jerzy Bartmiński, Stanisława Niebrzegowska-Bartmińska, & Ryszard Nycz (Eds.), Punkt widzenia w języku i w kulturze (pp. 321-358). Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Carnap, Rudolf. (1967 [1928]). The Logical Structure of the World. Pseudoproblems in Philosophy. Transl. Rolf A. George. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Cejrowski, Wojciech. (2006). Rio Anaconda. 2nd ed. Poznań: Zysk i S-ka.

CODEE. (1986). Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. Ed. Terry F. Hoad. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Etymonline. (2001-2012). Online Etymological Dictionary. Douglas Harper. http:// www.etymonline.com/ [accessed November 30, 2012]

Gärdenfors, Peter. (2005). Concept learning and nonmonotonic reasoning. In Henri Cohen & Claire Lefebvre (Eds.), Handbook of Categorization in Cognitive Science (pp. 823-843). Elsevier.

Heil, John. (2003). From Ontological Point of View. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hume, David. (1975 [1739-1740]). A Treatise of Human Nature. Ed. L. A. Selby- Bigge, 2nd ed. revised by P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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James, William. (1950 [1890]). The Principles of Psychology. Volume Two. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, Inc.

Kuno, Susumu, & Kaburaki, Etsuko. (1977). Empathy and syntax. Linguistic Inquiry, 8 (4), 627-672.

Langacker, Ronald W. (1991). Concept, Image, and Symbol. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Langacker, Ronald W. (2008). Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Łozowski, Przemysław. (2000). Vagueness in Language. From Truth-Conditional Synonymy to un-Conditional Polysemy. Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

MacLaury, Robert E. (1995). Vantage theory. In John R. Taylor & Robert E. MacLaury (Eds.), Language and the Cognitive Construal of the World (pp. 231-276). Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

MacLaury, Robert E. (1997). Color and Cognition in Mesoamerica: Constructing Categories as Vantages. Austin: University of Texas Press. [paperback 2011]

MacLaury, Robert E. (2000). Linguistic relativity and the plasticity of categorization. In Martin Pütz & Marjolijn Verspoor (Eds.), Explorations in Linguistic Relativity (pp. 251-293). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

MacLaury, Robert E. (2002). Introducing vantage theory. Language Sciences, 24 (5-6), 493-536.

Mill, John Stuart. (1843). A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive: Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence, and the Methods of Scientific Investigation. London: John W. Parker, West Strand.

SJPDor. (1958-1969). Słownik języka polskiego. 11 vols. Ed. Witold Doroszewski. Warszawa: PWN.

Sweetser, Eve, & Fauconnier, Gilles. (1996). Cognitive links and domains: Basic aspects of Mental Space Theory. In Gilles Fauconnier & Eve Sweetser (Eds.), Spaces, Worlds and Grammar (pp. 1-28). Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press.

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Tabakowska, Elżbieta. (2004). Point of view in the theory of literature and in linguistics: Grammar or “a logic of reading”. In Barbara-Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk & Alina Kwiatkowska (Eds.), Imagery in language. Festschrift in Honour of Professor Ronald W. Langacker (pp. 693-710). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.

Talmy, Leonard. (2000). Toward a Cognitive Semantics. 2 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Tversky, Amos. (1977). Features of similarity. Psychological Review, 84 (4), 327- 352.

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Chapter 21 Jerzy Bartmiński’s linguistic worldview meets the Western cognitive tradition: the semantics of Polish and English plant names

Agnieszka Mierzwińska-Hajnos UMCS, Lublin, Poland

1. Introduction

The linguistic worldview1 (henceforth also LWV) is a project developed by the Ethnolinguistic School of Lublin (cf. Bartmiński, 1980, 1986, 1990, 2007, 2009/2012; also Zinken 2004a,b) since the early eighties. The general assumption underlying this approach focuses on the interpretation of reality expressed in the form of judgments about the world, people, things or events (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 23). Pointing to interpretation, rather than reflection, Bartmiński advocates the role of subjective perception and conceptualization of reality performed by the speakers of a given language, making the linguistic worldview not only “clearly subjective and anthropocentric”, but also “intersubjective (social)” (p. 23). Among various approaches to the notion of linguistic worldview, it is Bartmiński’s version that prevails in the so-called contemporary ethnolinguistic discourse. On the one hand, a wealth of data, painstaking analysis of conversations and interviews with rural speakers, narratives, proverbs, songs, fairy tales, or folk poetry – all of this places Bartmiński’s theory firmly in the ethnolinguistic

1 The term językowy obraz świata as understood by Jerzy Bartmiński has been rendered in English as either the linguistic picture of the world (e.g. Grzegorczykowa & Zaron, 1993; Levontina & Zalizniak, 2001; Wysoczański, 2005; Zinken, 2004a,b) or the linguistic image of the world (cf. Fabiszak et al., 2009). Following Bartmiński (2009/2012), in this study the term linguistic worldview will be used. Taking into account the intersubjective character of the linguistic worldview, Bartmiński notes: “It unites people in a given social environment, creates a community of thoughts, feelings and values. It influences (to what extent is a matter for discussion) the perception and understanding of the social situation by a member of the community” (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 23).

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paradigm; on the other hand, many specific theoretical proposals, such as the so- called cognitive definition, place Bartmiński’s linguistic worldview in the frame of the Western cognitive linguistics tradition (cf. Kardela, 1990; Tabakowska, 2004). Indeed, as noted by Zinken (2009/2012), the striking similarities between the proposals of the Lublin Ethnolinguistics School and those of Anglo-American cognitive linguistics can hardly be overlooked (cf. Langacker, 1987, 1988a,b, 2008). The aim of this paper is to apply the analysis and reconstruction of the linguistic worldview, as proposed by Bartmiński, to plant names, which offer enormous interpretive possibilities. It seems that the attempt to define a plant term through the prism of Bartmiński’s approach is likely to shed new light on our understanding of seemingly obvious concepts. At the same time, we shall closely examine those notions used by Bartmiński that bear resemblance to the notions used in the Western cognitive linguistic tradition.

2. The linguistic worldview and the Western cognitive tradition

Echoes of the role of language in perceiving reality can be found as early as Aristotle’s Poetics, where the generally known and widely acceptable judgments labeled topoi (loci communes) were used in the process of deduction and argumentation, underlying logical syllogisms (Aritsotle, Poetics II, 21-22). Other characteristic features of the linguistic worldview, described as Weltansicht, draw from the 19th and 20th century German ethnolinguistic tradition (cf. Humboldt, 1836; Anusiewicz, 1990). One should also stress the importance of the so called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, i.e. the idea that the nature of a given language influences the habitual thought of its speakers, and that different patterns of language yield different patterns of thought (Whorf, 1964, pp. 212-214). Finally, contemporary research upon the linguistic worldview, in the form carried out by the Ethnolinguistic School of Lublin, owes a great deal to the work of Anna Wierzbicka2 and the Moscow Semantic School, where the concepts of “the

2 Research based on the Natural Semantic Metalanguage carried out by Wierzbicka provides interesting observations on the relationship between the language, culture and history of the linguistic communities examined (cf. Wierzbicka, 1985, 1992, 1996, 1997). Similar comparative linguistic research is carried out by other Polish linguists, inter alia Puzynina (1989, 1992a,b, 1997, 1998), Grzegorczykowa (1990, 2001, 2004), Waszakowa (Grzegorczykowa & Waszakowa, 2000-2003).

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world model” and “naïve world model” are still being developed on the grounds of Russian ethnolinguistics.3 Although nowadays the notion of “linguistic worldview” is understood in many ways, no particular version has been “officially” selected as binding, as various linguists seem to stress different aspects of the term.4 Bartmiński’s definition of linguistic worldview stresses its epistemological (interpretive) nature perceived as a “set of judgments,” which “is not limited to what is ‘fossilized’ or closed as a ‘structure’ [but] makes room for the dynamic, open nature of the worldview, and does not favor abstract ‘regularity’ in grammar and vocabulary” (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 24). What Bartmiński and cognitive linguistics models share is a holistic approach to meaning, i.e. an “attempt to characterise [this] meaning against a broader experiential background” (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 3). Although the emphasis on lexical semantics and conceptualization is expressed in a different way (Bartmiński mainly explores the dialectological, folkloristic, and ethnographic parameters of a word’s meaning), this does not undermine the achievements of the Ethnolinguistic School of Lublin within the cognitive paradigm. Let us now see to what extent the reconstruction of the linguistic worldview meets the demands of Western cognitive tradition, trying to juxtapose Jerzy Bartmiński’s

3 It is worth reflecting upon the following observation made by Apresyan (1974, pp. 57- 59, quoted in Wierzbicka, 1985, p. 197): The naive picture of the world, which is slowly formed throughout centuries, and which includes a naive geometry, a naive physics, a naive psychology and so on, reflects the material and spiritual experience of a people and can therefore be specific for people in two respects. First, the naive picture of a certain domain of reality can differ strikingly from the purely logical, scientific picture of that domain, which is common to people speaking very different languages. The task of a lexicographer, if he does not want to abandon his own discipline and turn into an encyclopaedist, consists in revealing the naive picture of the world hidden in the lexical meanings of words and reflecting it in a system of explications... Second, the naive pictures of the world, which can be extracted by semantic analysis from meanings of words in different languages, can differ in various details from one another, whereas the scientific picture of the world does not depend on the language in which it is described. See also Apresyan (1994, 1995), Ivanov & Toporov (1985), Tolstoy (1990, 1995, 1997), Tolstaya (1993, 2004, 2006), Arutyunova (1994, 1999), and others (cf. Bartmiński, 2007, p. 12). 4 Grzegorczykowa, for instance, stresses a “conceptual structure fossilized in the system of a given language” (1990, p. 43). Tokarski, in turn, focuses on a “set of regularities in grammatical and lexical structures, manifesting various ways of perceiving the world” (Tokarski, 1998, p. 10). According to Maćkiewicz, the linguistic worldview interprets the “reality a human being encounters, and regulates human behavior towards this reality” (Maćkiewicz, 1999, p. 52, translation mine, A.M.H.). Muszyński and Korżyk seem to go one step further by stressing the so-called “co-linguistic” data, such as socially entrenched, belief-based knowledge of the world, common to the speaker (sender) and the hearer (receiver), without which both the process of communication and the interpretation of an utterance would not be possible (Muszyński, 1988; Korżyk, 1999; also Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 34; the term ad-linguitic is used in the latter publication).

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cognitive definition with the notion of the domain matrix as proposed by Ronald Langacker (2008). Both notions will be applied to the analysis of plant names.

3. Bartmiński’s approach vs. Langacker’s model: where Eastern and Western traditions meet

3.1 The cognitive definition

Bartmiński describes the cognitive definition5 in the following way: The cognitive definition aims to portray the way in which an entity is viewed by the speakers of the language, to represent socio- culturally established and linguistically entrenched knowledge, its categorisation and valuation. While recognising the need to distinguish between the linguistic and encyclopedic dictionary (i.e. not to extend a description of language onto a description of the world), this approach does not set a firm boundary between so called linguistic and encyclopedic knowledge. The boundary is “elastic”: extralinguistic phenomena, such as customs and beliefs, certainly are part of meaning. Relating to Putnam’s distinction between semantic markers and ‘stereotypical’ elements in a word’s intention, one could say that the role of the cognitive definition is to also capture the latter. The defined entity is a ‘mental object’, a projection, not a reflection of the real-life artifact, although one can always compare the two to find similarities between them. (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 67)

The notion of the cognitive definition is best understood when it is juxtaposed with the taxonomic definition. For instance, rosemary, as defined by an ordinary dictionary, is “Rosmarinus officinalis, an evergreen shrub of the Labiatae family, native to the south of Europe, the leaves of which have an agreeable fragrance, and have been much used in perfumery and to some extent in medicine.”6 It can be easily observed that the lexicographic definition

5 The notion of the cognitive definition is used exclusively by Bartmiński. Western cognitivists use other terms to touch upon similar issues (cf. Langacker’s domain matrix, Fillmore’s frames, or Lakoff’s Idealised Cognitive Models). 6 See The Compact Oxford English Dictionary (1991). A taxonomic definition of rosemary in the Polish Słownik języka polskiego (1979) exhibits parameters identical to those presented in the English dictionary: “(bot.) Rosmarinus officinalis, an evergreen shrub of the Labiatae family, with white or blueish flowers, growing in the Mediterranean region, cultivated in Poland as a decorative pot plant; its leaves are used as an aromatic spice; rosemary oil is used in medicine and perfumery.”

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available in the dictionary displays both scientific and taxonomic features. The scientific character of the definition is manifested in making reference to scientific rather than everyday aspects, whereas the taxonomic character of the definition consists in identifying the denotatum by virtue of tools used in logical classification that allow the establishment of a superordinate level (in this case, the reference to the Labiatae family). Though transparent and useful, a lexicographic definition, strongly based on necessary and sufficient conditions, does not exhaust the meaning potential and the encyclopedic character of a given lexical item.7 Bartmiński’s idea of replacing the lexicographic definition with a cognitive counterpart bereft of a consistently hierarchical structure and corresponding to “the interpretive perspective adequate to the competence of the speakers of a given language or of its variety” (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 68) leads us towards an understanding of a word’s meaning which displays a profound connection between language and culture. Following Bartmiński’s insights and pointing to the meaning of the word as a “culturally determined interpretation of a world” that should be “brought to the surface” in a definition (p. 68),8 it seems expedient to present a cognitive definition of the same plant rosemary, as proposed in the preliminary installment of the Dictionary of Folk Symbols and Stereotypes (Bartmiński, 1980):9

7 Bartmiński (2009/2012, p. 68) says: The scientific nature of the definitions diminishes their descriptive value, especially in the case of older, highly polysemous vocabulary, characterised by rich derivation and phraseology. Although useful in many respects, they do not help one interpret the way lexical units function in language and texts. They do not explain the semantic motivation of the derivatives. Therefore, I propose to include in the definition also the words’ connotations. Also Apresyan strongly advocates the need to take note of “semantic associations, or connotations, i.e. those pragmatic features which reflect cultural notions or traditions, habitual ways of using a given kind of thing and many other extralinguistic factors” (Apresyan, 1974, p. 67, after Wierzbicka, 1985, p. 198). 8 Bartmiński’s speculations on language coincide with observations made by Western cognitive linguists. Langacker, for instance, describes the meaning of a word as a cognitive structure entrenched in knowledge patterns and the experience of a given language community. Meaning is therefore identified with conceptualization: word meanings have no boundaries as they are inextricably bound up in the whole system of knowledge (Langacker, 1991, pp. 4-5). Similar observations are made by Tabakowska, who claims that “language is a direct reflection of cognitive processes which occur in the human mind and are inherent elements of human cognition” (Tabakowska, 1995, p. 20, translation mine, A.M.H.). 9 Since it is impossible to present a thorough explication of the examined term in the chapter, the author chooses a few facets of the word, which may prove successful to show the differences between a cognitive and a lexicographic definition. For a detailed cognitive explication of rosemary, see Bartmiński (1980).

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rosemary

Lexeme-entry: rosemary – rozmaryjan, rozmaryjon, rozmairon, (phonetic variants), maryjan, Marsjanek, rozmarynek (morphological variants) Explication: an evergreen shrub with white flowers, of beautiful fragrance, used in medicine, tended by lovers, especially girls until the moment of their wedding day Hyperonym: herb, flower, shrub Co-hyponym: rue, rose, lilac, poppy Collection: rosemary + a girl, rosemary + ribbons Partitive: rosemary has white flowers Attribute: green, rank, bushy Quantitative: a rosemary sprig is pinned to the clothes of wedding guests Procesual: rosemary sprouts, grows, turns green, flowers, smells Stimulus: rosemary is dear to a girl

It is evident that the cognitive definition proposed by Bartmiński differs from traditional lexicographic definitions, as manifested in the following characteristics (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, pp. 71-75): • The inclusion of folk knowledge in the definition (the so-called content adequacy): the descriptive metalanguage must be the colloquial variant, without elevated, bookish or scientific expressions.10 This can be achieved by: (i) analyzing the entry word against the language system; (ii) analyzing the word in texts; (iii) using questionnaires with native speakers who propose their own definitions; (iv) referring to sociological and ethnographic data (the data should pertain to the use of a given object in culture, to the behavior of speakers in relation to the object as well as to the accompanying beliefs). • The requirement of structural adequacy, through which a cognitive definition reconstructs the relationships between the components present in the collective consciousness of speakers. This means that it rejects the limitations imposed on the definiens (i.e. all necessary and sufficient features used for the identification of thedenotatum ) in favor of all positive features established in the linguistic worldview. • The definition should be exhaustive – therefore it is rather long and its internal organization is of prime importance.11

10 In this sense Bartmiński’s metalanguage used in his cognitive definition is similar to Wierzbicka’s notion of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage. 11 Compare Bartmiński’s conception of the cognitive definition with Wierzbicka’s (1985) explications and Pawłowski’s (1978) notion of the fragmentary definition.

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• The cognitive definition resembles a single-level organization, where obligatory components are those pertaining to the object’s function,12 origin, material makeup, quality, etc. (see the cognitive definition of rosemary above). It is not important to include the categorizing factor, as it is in the case of the taxonomic definition; thus, the cognitive definition has a wider application, extending onto the so-called indefinibilia.13 • The cognitive definition must take into account a detailed relationship between the connotative components of a given concept, which manifests itself in the conjunction (or co-occurrence) of features (e.g. rosemary has white flowers and it smells nice), as well as in the cause- and-effect manner (e.g. rosemary is dear to a girl – it is tended by young girls until their wedding day – its sprig is pinned to the clothes of wedding guests). • Apart from the multitude of features that are selectively attributed to the object, Bartmiński’s definition also includes stereotypical features (cf. Lippmann, 1961 [1922]; Putnam, 1975; Lewicki, 1976; Pisarek, 1975; Pisarkowa, 1976).14

12 It has to be stated that the word “object” is used by Bartmiński interchangeably with the notion “concept.” Consider the following observation made by Zinken: “The cognitive definition [...] is intended to be a definition of the concept as it could be given by the envisaged idealised subject” (Zinken, 2009/2012, p. 2). 13 Wierzbicka’s (1994) notion is introduced by Bartmiński to emphasize the importance of functional and partonomic concepts in everyday language that “categorise reality in a particular manner, without complicating the vertical structure or building abstract hierarchical arrangements” (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 72). Even though folk definitions of such concepts as rosemary contain superordinate taxonomic levels (in this case herb), it is equally common to define them via partonomic and functional definitions, as happens in Bartmiński’s cognitive definition. 14 Stereotypes play an important role in Bartmiński’s research, especially in the reconstruction of the cognitive definition, where their semantic understanding should be of vital concern. An important remark here may be Putnam’s observation that allows for the incorporation of stereotypes into a description of word meaning: My proposal is that the normal form description of the meaning of a word should be finite sentence, or “vector,” whose components should certainly include the following: [...] i) the syntactic markers to apply to the word, e.g. “noun,” ii) the semantic markers that apply to the word, e.g. “animal,” “period of time,” iii) a description of the additional features of the stereotype, if any, (iv) a description of the extension [...].” (Putnam, 1975, p. 269) An interesting remark is also made by Muszyński (1982, p. 24): [A]n important aspect of Putnam’s analysis is that the stereotype is understood as a theory of an object [...]. As a result, no significant differences are postulated between scientific concepts and those connected with stereotypes based on folk knowledge. Both play the same role in relation to different conceptions of the world, depending on the views of the subject, i.e. a speaker of the language in which these concepts operate. The basic task of these theories is to explain, describe, and order entities and phenomena with which humans have to do.

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• Defining sentences of a cognitive definition are based upon a categorical, facet-based arrangement.15

The cognitive definition should also be considered in the context of other vital notions such as point of view (viewpoint), perspective, profiling, and finally, facet. Their important role will be accounted for by way of an example of another plant term: bławatek ‘cornflower/bluebottle.’ According to Bartmiński, bławatek is conceptualized not only as a “plant” but it might successfully be perceived as a “flower,” “weed,” or even “medicinal herb” (Bartmiński, 2007). Such disparate conceptualizations of the same denotatum are the result of the assumed point of view, perspective, and profiling – all responsible for the connotation of the so-called initial categories and determining a number of characteristic traits typical for these categories, which are arranged in facets, further categories that allow the organization of defining phrases (Bartmiński, 2007, p. 50). Bartmiński claims that a point of view that has a decisive influence upon the shape of an initial category – usually upon a hyperonym responsible for further linguistic categorization within an established explication of the word – should be understood as a “subjective-cultural factor governing the way of talking about an object, e.g. governing the object’s categorization, the choice of an onomasiological basis for creating its name and the selection of features attributed to the object in specific utterances and entrenched in meaning” (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 77). Perspective is understood as “a set of properties of the semantic structure of words, correlated with and, at least to a certain extent, resulting from a point of view” (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 78). The identification of these properties enables the receiver of an utterance to recognize the point of view assumed by the speaker. Profiling, in turn, is a vital “subjective linguistic-conceptual operation, consisting in a specific configuration of the object’s image in terms of particular aspects (sub- categories, facets), such as, e.g., origin, traits, appearance, functions, events, experiences, etc., within a certain type of knowledge and in keeping with a specific point of view” (Bartmiński & Niebrzegowska, 1998, pp. 212-213; trans. Jörg Zinken). Bartmiński compares profiling to a “tamed holism,” which he describes in the following way:

15 As observed by Bartmiński (2009/2012, p. 90), “[t]he notion of facet derives from other realms of scholarship. The conception of facet-based classification is used in the theory of information retrieval [...], devised by the Indian bibliographer Shiyali R. Ranganathan (1933, 1951). In information technology a facet means ‘subcategory’, a group of classes with a certain characteristic, e.g. the material from which something is made, the type of activity etc.”

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The concept of profiling aids in a description that reconstructs not just the linguistically entrenched stereotypical judgments about an object, but also their order when the object is seen from a particular perspective, understood as a metaphor for the social situatedness of the subject. (Bartminski, 2009/2012, p. 3)16

Let us now analyze two instances of the plant term bławatek and its general explication as adopted by Bartmiński (2007, pp. 82-83) – cf. Table 21.1.

Table 21.1 Bławatek in Bartmiński’s analysis HYPERONYM FACETS (sub-categories responsible for (established according to further arrangement of defining phrases the adopted viewpoint and determined by profiling): perspective): BŁAWATEK [appearance], [scent], [flowering time], (CORNFLOWER) FLOWER [occurrence], [usefulness] [occurrence], [appearance], WEED [harmfulness to farmers’aims], [methods of elimination]

It seems reasonable at this point to elaborate on the notion of the so- called facet. Facets, also called aspects, “bundles of judgments,” categories, or subcategories (Bartmiński, 2007) remain one of the most fundamental, yet somewhat vague notions needed to reconstruct the cognitive definition of the word in Bartmiński’s sense.17 Generally speaking, facets are qualified as those

16 It has to be noted that the notion of profiling is widely used in the literature on semantics, in American cognitivism (Ronald Langacker), and in Anna Wierzbicka’s research. It seems that Bartmiński prefers Wierzbicka’s understanding, as it corresponds with the anthropological model, thoroughly tested on data from both folk and standard varieties of language. At the same time, Bartmiński points out certain similarities that may contribute to the same research area (2009/2012, p. 88): “The similarities are based on the analysis of meaning of certain language expressions within a wider context, which for Wierzbicka is the Fillmorian notion of ‘prototypical situation’ (Wierzbicka 1985) and for Langacker is the notion of a ‘cognitive domain’, corresponding to something that others call a ‘frame’ or an ‘idealised cognitive model’ (Langacker, 2000, pp. 4-7).” The difference between Bartmiński’s attitude towards conceptualizing objects and Langacker’s proposal will be discussed in subsequent parts of this contribution. 17 It seems necessary to draw special attention to the following statement made by Bartmiński (2007, pp. 100-101): Facets (sub-categories, aspects) play a leading role in our conceptual system. All three notions, frequently used interchangeably, mean more or less the same. It would be advisory to use one notion, e.g. a facet [...]. Langacker and his followers use in this sense the notion of domain. [emphasis mine] As will be pointed out later in this study, the understanding of Bartmiński’s facet does not coincide with that of domain as proposed by Langacker.

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aspects of a given concept that contain defining phrases dependent on the adopted viewpoint and on profiling, and whose arrangement constitutes the so-called “cognitive structure of meaning” as understood by Wierzbicka (1985). Both the choice of facets and their order within a given explication differ for different types of dictionary entries (Bartmiński, 2007, p. 50).18 The problem of naming facets is also vital. The first idea (Bartmiński, 1980, p. 21) was to adopt Aristotelian ontological categories. In the contemporary version, the naming of facets arises from an “observation of how an average mortal relates to the surrounding world” (Jodłowski, 2003, p. 12). Bartmiński himself claims that a “good categorization” [understood here as facet arrangement – A.M.H.] should be “the most banal [...], maximally approaching the experiences, feelings and intuitions of the so called ‘simple people’” (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 87). We can now ask whether the meanings of such plant terms as Polish fiołek ‘violet’ connoting ‘the tip of a fox’s tail,’ banan ‘banana’ standing for ‘a type of vehicle,’ or English pansy understood as ‘effeminate boy or man’ (or even ‘effeminate homosexual’) obtain equal status as initial categories within a cognitive definition, and also, following from this, whether they receive appropriate facets on the same basis as those established for the previously discussed bławatek ‘cornflower.’ The answer is not simple. If we assume, after Bartmiński, that “point of view is a decisive factor that has a tremendous influence upon the preliminary categorization of a given object and shapes the perspective in which the object is presented in the linguistic picture of the world” (Bartmiński, 2007, p. 83, translation mine, A.M.H.), such variants as fiołek ‘violet/fox’s tail,’ banan ‘banana/vehicle,’ or pansy ‘effeminate homosexual’ seem to fulfill this condition. On the other hand, Bartmiński (2007, p. 82) appears to exclude polysemy from the scope of interests pertaining to linguistic worldview, which finally results in the omission of these meanings from the cognitive definition being postulated.19 Thus, we end up with a cognitive definition of the word that seems to diverge from its lexicographic counterpart and simultaneously does not allow for any “bizarre” meanings in

18 As observed by Bartmiński, Wierzbicka emphasizes that the order of facets is not optional and results from the “internal logic of a given meaning.” (Bartmiński, 2007, p. 86, translation mine). 19 Bartmiński says: I am not interested here in polysemy, in which case systematic differences in a lexeme’s meaning (but above all in its denotation) motivate those in categorisation: kamień ‘stone’, ‘figure in a game’ or ‘unit of weight’: kania ‘kite’ (bird) or ‘parasol mushroom’, kret ‘mole’ or ‘mole plough’, etc. Rather, I am focusing on names with the same denotation but different connotations, depending on different viewpoints and different categorisations, adjusted to the viewpoints. (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 87) A more flexible dynamic on-line model of conceptualization is proposed by Langacker with his notion of the domain matrix (to be discussed later on in this chapter).

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the explication. Such an attitude makes the cognitive definition in Bartmiński’s sense more structural and less flexible and encyclopedic in character.20 Bartmiński’s idea of the cognitive definition is an important element of an analysis that aims at reconstructing linguistic worldview. With the wealth of notions underlying the cognitive definition, such as profiling, point of view, perspective, or facets (aspects), the cognitive definition makes it possible to “reconstruct the linguistically entrenched interpretation of the world by a subject in terms that are meaningful for that subject” (Zinken, 2009/2012, p. 2). The question of whether we are talking about a dynamic approach to the concept that allows the establishment of an open set of characteristics bereft of any boundaries imposed on a definition is still dubious here. Obviously, one should not minimize the role of the linguistic worldview as proposed by Bartmiński and the impact that this notion has on contemporary linguistics. Detailed studies of language reconstructed from various language communities as well as the wealth of recalled linguistic contexts undoubtedly place linguistic worldview within the cognitive linguistic enterprise. Still, together with its static and structure-oriented viewpoint (e.g. facet arrangement) and the manifestation of a clear-cut boundary between linguistic and extra-linguistic knowledge, Bartmiński’s concept does not cross certain boundaries as far as his approach to definitions and defining is concerned. Whether such a possibility exists at all will be discussed in the subsequent part of this chapter.

3.2 Domain matrix

I will now discuss Ronald Langacker’s approach to word meaning. In numerous works, Langacker stresses the necessity to activate encyclopedic knowledge in order to understand a given concept properly. According to Langacker, treating word meanings as “small discrete chunks of conceptual structure” (Croft & Cruse, 2004, p. 30) should be discarded in favor of an approach that allows us to view the meaning of a word as an access node into a knowledge network:

The entity designated by a symbolic unit can therefore be thought of as a point of access to a network. The semantic value of a symbolic unit is given

20 In doing so, Bartmiński seems to follow Wierzbicka’s (1996) approach. Although Wierzbicka incorporates much encyclopedic knowledge into her definitions, she still emphasizes the need for a strict division between the so-called linguistic (semantic) knowledge and encyclopedic knowledge, claiming that knowledge about some things we associate with a particular denotatum are not part of the linguistic meaning of the word (see, for instance, her definition of mouse). This attitude towards a strict distinction between linguistic and encyclopedic knowledge follows from a number of theoretical commitments underlying her approach (Taylor, 2002, pp. 455-456).

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by the open-ended set of relations... in which this access node participates. Each of these relations is a cognitive routine, and because they share at least one component the activation of one routine facilitates (but does not always necessitate) the activation of another. (Langacker, 1987, p. 163)

According to Langacker, the encyclopedic and dynamic character of concepts is an innate feature of each linguistic meaning that should be analyzed against five basic claims (Langacker, 1988b, pp. 49-50): • meaning reduces to conceptualization (mental experience); • a frequently-used expression typically displays a network of interrelated senses; • semantic structures are characterized relative to cognitive domains (emphasis mine); • a semantic structure derives its value through the imposition of a “profile” (designatum) on a “base”; • semantic structures incorporate conventional “imagery,” i.e. they construe a situation in a particular fashion. Special attention should be drawn to cognitive domains. Langacker analyzes a semantic unit (taking into account the concept rather than the word itself) using the notion of domain, i.e. any knowledge configuration that provides the context for the conceptualization of this unit (Taylor, 2002, p. 439). Since the majority of concepts require more than one domain for their full characterization, such a set of relevant domains constitutes the domain matrix against which a concept is characterized (Langacker, 1987; also Taylor, 2002, p. 439). Langacker views the domain matrix as an essentially open-ended knowledge base, within which new usage of a semantic unit can be easily accommodated. In this respect, accessing an expression’s meaning via cognitive domains is more encyclopedic than doing so via a dictionary entry or the cognitive definition as proposed by Bartmiński.21

21 It has to be noted that although Langacker’s proposal to define concepts via cognitive domains may be understood as the most holistic and dynamic approach of those already discussed, it still allows for the notion of semantic primitives, although language seems to interpret them in a different way than Wierzbicka. Consider the following observations: [T]he starting point for semantic analysis of a given expression is an integrated conceptualization which may have any degree of internal complexity. Obvious though it may seem, this type of account differs significantly from certain others that are commonly assumed. First, it contrasts with the view that the meaning of an expression is directly describable in terms of a fixed vocabulary of semantic primitives; a cognitive domain need not be primitive, nor is there any fixed, limited set of them. Second, it rejects the idea that an expression’s meaning is represented as a bundle of semantic markers of features; a cognitive domain is an integrated conceptualization in its own right, not a feature bundle. What occupies the lowest level in hierarchies of conceptual complexity? I do not necessarily posit conceptual primitives, being essentially neutral as to their existence. It is however necessary to assume inborn capacity for mental experience, i.e. a set of cognitively irreducible representational spaces or fields of conceptual potential; I refer to these as “basic domains.” (Langacker, 1988b, p. 54)

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The difference between the dictionary view of linguistic semantics andits encyclopedic counterpart in Langacker’s sense is shown in Figure 21.1.

dictionary semantics encyclopedic semantics

Fig. 21.1 Dictionary semantics vs. encyclopedic semantics (Langacker, 2008, p. 39)

As Langacker puts it, a dictionary entry provides limited knowledge of a semantic unit, knowledge that is confined to a few semantic features or descriptive statements that are clearly set apart from general knowledge concerning the type of entity referred to. Conversely, the lexical-semantic approach emphasizes the fact that lexical meaning lies in a particular way of accessing an open-ended body of knowledge related to a certain type of entity (Langacker, 2008, pp. 38-39). Adopting the encyclopedic view of linguistic semantics, Langacker’s domains also establish an open-ended set called a conceptual matrix of a given expression, in which there is room for varying degrees of centrality. Similar observations can be made with reference to plant names. Consider the case of banana, as discussed by Langacker:

Most concepts require specifications in more than one domain for their characterization. The concept [BANANA], for example, includes in its matrix a specification for shape in the spatial (and/or visual) domain; a color configuration involving the coordination of colour space with this domain; a location in the domain of taste/smell sensations; as well as numerous specifications pertaining to abstract domains, e.g. the knowledge that bananas are eaten, that they grow in bunches on trees, that they come from tropical areas and so on. (Langacker, 1987, p. 154)

Obviously, the knowledge of the concept [BANANA] as discussed by Langacker is not confined to the explication given above. Apart from certain domains that are virtually always activated whenever the expression is used (e.g. the domain of color or shape), there are also those activated less frequently (e.g. the domain

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indicating origin), or even ones so peripheral that we refer to them only in special circumstances. Therefore, the concept [BANANA] may also be recalled while talking about: • an inflated swimming device in the shape of banana drawn by a motorboat (source: Focus, 8/2000); • a small country that is economically dependent on a single export commodity, such as bananas, and is typically governed by a dictator or the armed forces (Z magazine, April 2000); • a truncheon (Słownik tajemnych gwar przestępczych, 1993, p. 29); • a nail file (www.sallybeauty.com); • a type of banana-shaped plug (www.muellerelectric.com); • a banana-shaped bag (www.my-wardrobe.com); • a broad smile (www.filmweb.pl); as well as several other uses that emphasize different domains against which the concept is understood, such as the information that people can slip on banana skins, or, in the most extreme cases, that our sister put sliced bananas on her cereal for breakfast this morning (Langacker, 1987, p. 159; also Taylor, 2002, p. 442).22 However diversified the domains may be, it has to be noted that they overlap with one another within a complex matrix, often to the point of full inclusion (Langacker, 2008, p. 47). Therefore, the shape of [BANANA], activated in the spatial domain, is recalled not only while describing the fruit but also in such distant meanings of the concept as a swimming device or a truncheon. The situation is presented in Figure 21.2.

Fig. 21.2 A domain matrix (Langacker, 2008, p. 48)

22 For further details about the domain matrix and semantic flexibility, see Taylor (2002, pp. 441-448).

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Obviously, one can raise an objection against the encyclopedic approach as understood by Langacker and his notion of the domain matrix, claiming that not everything that we know about a given concept has equal status and is both linguistically and semantically relevant.23 Without doubt, bamboo is first and foremost perceived as a tall tropical plant with hollow stems that is used for making furniture and, as such, is activated more frequently than a bamboo standing for an Afro-American, a head, or a silly person.24 Should we therefore exclude the domains activated by the last three words from the domain matrix of the concept [BAMBOO], treating them as highly peripheral? If not, is there any possibility to assign to them the role of central domains on a par with the one indicating typical and commonly shared characteristics of [BAMBOO]? It seems that there is no unambiguous answer, which does not mean that there is no feasible solution to the problem at all. What differentiates Langacker’s theory from other attitudes towards lexical semantics presented in this chapter is the idea of an open-ended encyclopedic description of a word that manifests itself in a dynamic character of the domain matrix. “Language is learned and used in context,” says Langacker (1987, p. 155), emphasizing that we can talk about any facet of our conceptual universe and that a given expression allows us to make indefinitely many interpretations depending on the conceived situation to which it is applied. That is why centrality, understood by Langacker as “the likelihood of a particular domain being activated when an expression is used on a given occasion” (2008, p. 48), allows us to accept such cases as daisy ‘one that is deemed excellent or notable,’ pansy ‘an effeminate homosexual,’ rose ‘a compass card or its representation,’ ziemniak-przeszkoda ‘potato understood as an obstacle’ or kasztan-włamywacz ‘chestnut in the sense of a burglar’25 both

23 Cf. Wierzbicka’s (1996) discussion of the definition of mouse. 24 For further semantic extensions of bamboo and the way the word may be conceptualized by Polish people, see the definition proposed by the Dictionary of Polish Language (available at: www.sjp.pwn.pl). 25 The above examples indicate dynamic processes that come along the process of semantic extension. If we take into account the literal meaning of the word potato, it is likely to occur in the central position only when conceptualized as a plant. As it is shown by Bartłomiej Chaciński in his dictionary of neologisms and newly coined terms in Polish language, potato may also be conceptualized as ‘an obstacle,’ and, when used in the context of problems, the latter meaning of the word potato gains its central status (cf. Totalny słownik najmłodszej polszczyzny, 2007, p. 328). The same rule applies to all the examples provided in this fragment.

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in central and peripheral domains, whose status changes dynamically, depending on the activated context in which a given word is used.26 Langacker also says that “certain domains are so central that we can hardly use the expression without evoking them, some are activated less consistently, and others are so peripheral that we invoke them only in special circumstances, when they happen to be relevant” (2008, p. 48). The degrees of centrality are presented in Figure 21.3.

Central Decreasing importance Peripheral

Figure 21.3 The degrees of domains’ centrality (Langacker, 2008, p. 48)

Nevertheless, it has to be noted that the dynamic character of domains whose centrality is context-dependent does not entitle us to establish only a general pattern where particular domains are always central, whereas others are always peripheral. According to a dynamic, on-line account of meaning, in which it is “never totally fixed or invariable” (Langacker, 2008, p. 49), even the most peripheral domain can obtain central status depending on the type of context established. Obviously, Langacker’s idea of defining concepts via cognitive domains cannot be treated on a par with sample definitions proposed by Bartmiński. Nevertheless, the notion of the domain matrix, although dealt with on the conceptual and cognitive level, points to the importance of the encyclopedic character of meaning and, as such, may contribute to a deeper understanding of a word’s meaning.

26 Langacker elaborates on the notion of centrality in the following way: I posit no specific boundary between our linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge of the entity designated by a term [...] Far more realistic, I believe, is to posit a gradation of “centrality” in the specifications constituting our encyclopedic knowledge of an entity: some domains and specifications are obviously more salient and linguistically more important than others, and in practise we will focus our attention primarily on these, but the imposition of any precise or rigid boundary is considered arbitrary. A number of factors contribute to a specification’s degree of centrality, among them whether the specified property is inherent or contingent, whether it is generic or specific, whether it is peculiar to the entity in question or shared by many others, and so on [...] At the level of cognitive processing, centrality can be explicated as the likelihood that a particular specification will be activated on a given occasion when a term is used. (1988b, pp. 57-58)

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4. Conclusions

The discussion of the two approaches to the semantic analysis of plant terms points to the pivotal role of context in determining word meaning. That the study of meaning is central to the linguistic enterprise is hardly surprising. As pointed out by Jackendoff (2002, p. 267),

meaning is the “holy grail” not only of linguistics, but also of philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience... Understanding how we mean and how we think is a vital issue for our intuitive sense of ourselves as human beings. For most people, meaning is intuitively the central issue of the study of language – far more important than understanding details of word order or morphology.

The two approaches discussed in this chapter crucially exploit, to use Chomsky’s (1965, p. 202) parlance, “extralinguistic information” in defining word meaning, although they do so using different tools. Thus, Bartmiński relies heavily on empirical findings that allow him to reconstruct socio-cultural situatedness.27 This manifests itself in the way that Bartmiński’s definition is structured. Bartmiński proposes the cognitive definition, which represents “socio-culturally established and linguistically entrenched knowledge, its categorisation and valuation” (2009/2012, p. 67). Langacker, in turn, stresses the importance of accessing meaning via more theoretical constructs, namely domains. Another feature that is shared by the two approaches is the attitude towards the distinction between linguistic and encyclopedic knowledge. The issue that allows for the juxtaposition of a typical cognitive semantic approach with a more classical lexical field approach is reflected in both approaches, although a certain evolution towards the conception of meaning explicitly encyclopedic

27 Bartmiński views language and culture as inseparable elements of a successful interpretation of meaning, which manifests itself in his reconstruction of linguistic worldview: It is only natural that ethnolinguistics so understood deals with the general but nevertheless fundamental problems of language and culture, the function(s) of language and its internal differentiation into variants and styles, the lexis as a classifier of social experience and semantic categories with their formal exponents. It also deals with the more rarely investigated problems of text as the basic unit of linguistic communication or with the important and complex issue of judgments, norms and evaluations present in and conveyed through language. The ultimate aim has always been to arrive at the speaking subject, homo loquens, his perception and conceptualisation of the world, mentality and value system. (2009/2012, p. 11)

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in nature is favored.28 As observed by Fillmore and Atkins (1992, pp. 76-7; after Geeraerts, 2010, pp. 222-223),

[a] major activity for lexical semanticists influenced by the field notion is that of cataloguing the kind of inter-item relations that can be defined for the elements of the lexicon, and characterising the kinds of lexical sets that are structured in terms of such relationships. Semantic theories founded on a notion of cognitive frames or knowledge schemata, by contrast, approach the description of lexical meaning in a quite different way. In such theories, the word’s meaning can be understood only with reference to a structured background of experience, beliefs, or practices, constituting a kind of conceptual prerequisite for understanding the meaning. Speakers can be said to know the meaning of the word only by first understanding the background frames that motivated the concept that the word encodes. Within such an approach, words and word senses are not related to each other directly, word to word, but only by way of the links to common background frames and indications of the manner in which their meanings highlight particular elements of such frames.

It appears that both Bartmiński and Langacker propose a dynamic model of accessing word meaning. This dynamicity is, however, understood by the two linguists in two different ways. Ronald Langacker proposes a flexible alternative towards meaning in which the main focus is laid on its on-line character. The dynamicity of meaning as understood by Bartmiński mainly consists in adopting various perspectives, viewpoints, types of “rationality and communicative intentions” (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 14) that allow us to reconstruct the linguistic worldview. It should also be stressed that both linguists focus on what we already know about a given language. However, Bartmiński’s linguistic worldview emphasizes the importance of available material (i.e. texts, myths, oral tradition, rituals, etc.). Langacker’s theory, understood here as the domain matrix, stresses the importance of context relative to which meanings of lexical items are defined, allowing for a basic, more individual conceptualization. Ronald Langacker’s open-ended, domain-based approach to defining and definitions can, it seems, offer more to the lexicographer than the facet-based

28 Compare Langacker’s idea of a possibility to activate an open-ended set of domains with Bartmiński’s insistence on a clear-cut boundary between what is linguistic and what is encyclopedic.

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approach to word meanings. This, as we have seen, is certainly true in the case of plant terms that involve semantic extensions, and semantic extensions, as Langacker puts it, “[are] such a pervasive and central linguistic phenomenon that one can legitimately question the wisdom of an approach to semantics that fails to account for [them] in a unified way” (Langacker, 1987, p. 157).

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Lewicki, Andrzej M. (1976). Wprowadzenie do frazeologii syntaktycznej. Katowice: Uniwersytet Śląski.

Lippmann, Walter. (1961 [1922]). Public Opinion. New York: The Macmillan Company.

Maćkiewicz, Jolanta. (1988). Świat widziany poprzez język. Gdańskie Zeszyty Humanistyczne, XXVI (30), 131-150.

Muszyński, Zbysław. (1982). Zależność znaczenia od koncepcji świata. Problem podmiotowej relatywizacji znaczenia. Ph.D. dissertation. UMCS, Lublin.

Muszyński, Zbysław. (1988). Problem wiedzy pozajęzykowej w badaniach lingwistycznych. In Jerzy Bartmiński (Ed.), Konotacja (pp. 129-153). Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Pawłowski, Tadeusz. (1978). Tworzenie pojęć i definiowanie w naukach humanistycznych. Warszawa: PWN.

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Pisarkowa, Krystyna. (1976). Konotacja semantyczna nazw narodowości. Zeszyty Prasoznawcze, 1, 5-26.

Putnam, Hilary. (1975). Mind, Language and Reality. Philosophical Papers. Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Puzynina, Jadwiga. (1992a). Język wartości. Warszawa: PWN.

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Puzynina, Jadwiga. (1997). Słowo – wartość – kultura. Lublin: TN KUL.

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Puzynina, Jadwiga. (1998). Struktura semantyczna narodu a profilowanie. In Jerzy Bartmiński & Ryszard Tokarski (Eds.), Profilowanie w języku i w tekście (pp. 259-276). Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

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Zinken, Jörg. (2004b). Punkt widzenia jako kategoria w porównawczym badaniu dyskursów politycznych. In Jerzy Bartmiński, Stanisława Niebrzegowska- Bartmińska, & Ryszard Nycz (Eds.), Punkt widzenia w języku i w kulturze (pp. 65- 78). Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

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Part V EXTENSIONS AND INSPIRATIONS

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Chapter 22 Evidentiality and the epistemic use of the Icelandic verbs sjá and heyra. A cultural linguistic view

Enrique Bernárdez Complutense University of Madrid, Spain

1. Introduction1

The basic meaning of the Icelandic verbs sjá and heyra can be taken from the standard Icelandic dictionaries. The Íslensk orðabók (2007) provides the following definitions ofsjá : (1a) skynja með augunum ‘to perceive with the eyes;’2 (1b) horfa á, skoða ‘to look at, watch.’ (2) koma auga á, finna, uppgötva ‘to catch sight of; find; discover.’ (3) skilja, geta skilið, gera sér grein fyrir ‘to understand; to be able to understand; to realise sth.’ As for the verb heyra, the only meaning in that dictionary that concerns us directly here is (1) greina, skynja hljóð ‘to distinguish/discern, to perceive sounds.’ But the Stóra orðabókin um íslenska málnotkun (2005) adds a reference to the domain of interest in our context, viz. vitneskja ‘knowledge.’3 A comparison can be made with the meanings of the corresponding verbs in Danish, taken from Den Danske Ordbog; as this dictionary is much more detailed than the Icelandic ones, and as both languages – as we shall see – share the essential mechanisms analysed in this chapter (only those entries and senses are included that directly touch on the issues dealt with here): 1. høre ‘to hear’: 1. (være i stand til at) opfatte lyd ved hjælp af hørelsen ‘(to be in the position to) perceive sounds with help of the sense of hearing’

1 Research for this paper was provided by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (research project FFI2010.19395). I thank the editors for their patience, especially Adam Głaz. Special thanks to Iraide Ibarretxe. 2 All translations are the author’s. 3 The Stóra orðabókin um íslenska málnotkun is a dictionary of usage and does not provide semantic definitions but the conditions of use, collocations, or, as here, the conceptual and semantic domains of use of the words.

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1a. udlede noget ud fra de lyde man opfatter ‘to infer something from the sounds perceived’ 2. rette sin hørelse opmærksomt mod noget og forstå eller fortolke det ‘to listen carefully to something and understand or interpret it’ 2a. gøre som nogen siger; opfylde en bøn ‘to do as someone says; to heed a request’ 3. få fortalt eller blive oplyst om ‘to be told or informed about’ 4. lytte til hvad nogen har at sige om en sag ‘listen to what somebody has to say on a topic’ 5. skaffe sig oplysning om noget ved at spørge ‘to get information about something by asking’

2. se ‘to see’: 1. opfatte lys ved hjælp af synssansen og omdanne det til billeder i hjernen; sanse med øjnene ‘perceive light with help of the sense of sight and transform it into images in the brain; feel with the eyes’ 1a. danne et sanseindtryk af omverdenen som svarer til et synsindtryk, men med andre sanser end synet ‘build a sensory impression of the environment that answers to a visual impression with senses different from sight’ 3. gøre til genstand for særlig, ofte længerevarende eller indgående iagttagelse ‘make sth the object of special, frequently lengthy or attentive observation’ 3a. betragte eller overvære noget og derved erhverve sig en bestemt viden... ‘examine or watch something and obtain through it a certain knowledge...’ 5. forstå en sammenhæng eller problematik; erkende ‘understand a relation or a group of problems; comprehend’ 5a. erkende eller gennemskue en tilstand eller et forhold ud fra ydre tegn, fremtræden eller opførsel ‘recognise or understand in depth a situation or a state from external signs, conduct or behavior’ 7. undersøge nærmere ‘to investigate in depth’

As we see, the array of senses is wider in Danish. Also the meanings related to knowing are much clearer in sjá/se than in heyra/høre. A consideration of the Icelandic expressions, idioms and (the equivalent of English) phrasal verbs instead of the simple verbs changes the picture somewhat. The Stóra Orðabókin um íslenska málnotkun (2005) indicates the conceptual domains corresponding to such expressions. Interestingly, the presence of senses related to knowing or learning, i.e., getting information, are more numerous for heyra than for sjá.

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2. Perception and Epistemic Senses

The relation between the “perception” and the “epistemic” senses is well known and has been analysed in the terms of Conceptual Metaphor Theory. The usual interpretation takes the form of such metaphors as seeing is knowing and hearing is knowing although further ones are also recognised (Sweetser, 1990). But the status of the two verbs is different, as the first metaphoric interpretation is taken to have the priority, the second being secondary. The basic, “default” assumption is that humans use the metaphor seeing is knowing as their essential way to metaphorically express knowing. This is clearly reflected in the main publications on the topic (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 1999; Sweetser, 1990). Matlock (1989, p. 222) writes that “[i]t is possible to posit another metaphor, e.g. hearing is knowing, but because this mapping is not very productive it is more feasible to posit a more general, higher level metaphor…” [emphasis added E.B.]. As we shall see, the Icelandic (but also Danish) data clearly contradict the lack of productivity of the hearing- metaphor. “Seeing” as the main source of knowing is explained in terms of the embodiment of cognition. Most of the time, humans access the reality around them by means of their eyes. Thus nothing can be more natural than taking “to see” as the basis on which to develop – through metaphor and metonymy – our conceptualisation and linguistic expression of knowing or getting to know. Such is the explanation advanced in Sweetser (1990) and Lakoff & Johnson (1999). These latter authors include the seeing is knowing metaphor in the group of “primary metaphors” (pp. 49ff); no equivalent metaphor with hearing as its source domain is included, while other senses are only indirectly present among the “primary metaphors”: understanding is grasping and seeing is touching. Sight, “seeing” is therefore given full priority: it has a clear primacy in how we access the world and consequently the metaphor linking vision and understanding or knowing is viewed as primary. But are things as clear as they may seem? Whereas Lakoff & Johnson (1999) do not enter into the crosslinguistic analysis of the issue, Sweetser (1990) does. Section 2.3. (pp. 32-37) of her book is devoted to the analysis of “sense- perception verbs in English and Indo-European.” The results of this analysis are usually considered the standard Cognitive Linguistics stance on the topic. Sweetser writes that “vision verbs commonly develop abstract senses of mental activity” (p. 33). She repeats the main explanatory assumption behind this fact: “This metaphor has its basis in vision’s primary status as a source of data.” She then adds, to reinforce her argument, a brief reference to evidentiality and the basic meaning of vision verbs associated with this category: studies of evidentials in many languages show that direct visual data is considered to be the most certain kind of knowledge.

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Of course, this fact has been very well known for over a century and a half. The Germanic praeterito-praesentium verb represented by Old English witan, Old and Contemporary German wissen, Old and Modern Icelandic vita, etc., is a development from an IDE root meaning ‘to see,’ in such a way that OE wát, German weiss and Icelandic veit meaning ‘I know’ go back to the form *woida (Greek oιδα) of a verb meaning ‘to see.’ Thus, “I have seen” was reinterpreted as “I know.” But the point in Sweetser’s proposal has a wider scope: it is supposed to represent a general, maybe universal, at least extremely basic form of conceptualisation of knowing in terms of seeing, which is also reinforced by the metaphoric development physical vision ⇒ mental “vision,” a development based on “the strong connection between sight and knowledge, and also on the shared structural properties of the visual and intellectual domains – our ability to focus our mental and visual attentions, to monitor stimuli mentally and visually” (p. 33). In contrast to the rather detailed analysis of seeing, the other senses are dealt with rather fleetingly. Sweetser points out that “verbs of hearing … often come to mean ‘listen, heed’ […]. From ‘heed’ we have a further semantic shift to ‘obey’ – Dan. lystre ‘obey’ also descends from the *k’leu-s root” (p. 35). It may seem strange that she should include only a reference to a Danish word that is absent from the colloquial language, as shown in the Ordbog over det Danske Sprog (the 27 vol. historical dictionary) and Den Danske Ordbog. The latter does not include the meaning ‘to obey’ except in a few idiomatic expressions. Moreover, it may sound strange to use as piece of evidence a word borrowed from another language: lystre, as well as its Swedish equivalent lystra, are all descended from Middle High German lüstern, and their basic, nowadays nearly exclusive meaning is ‘heed to, listen carefully to.’ It can be added that Icelandic also has a verb meaning ‘to obey’ derived from the same Indo-European root meaning ‘sound’; but while the verb meaning ‘to listen’ is hlusta, ‘to obey’ uses a historically very different form of the same stem:hlýða , in such a way that the connection is probably lost for the average Icelandic speaker. In these and the previous cases, the development to ‘obey’ seems to have passed in Icelandic and MHG through a derivative with an intensive meaning: to listen in a specially careful or attentive way. The domains of smell, taste, and feel are reviewed together in Sweetser’s section 2.3.3. (pp. 35-37). Reference is made to “Lat. sapere, meaning both ‘be wise, know’ and ‘taste.’ The sense of taste is here evidently connected not merely with general experience or perception, but with mental experience as well.” French savoir only has the epistemic meaning, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian use both meanings, as in Latin. It is rather odd that this possible counterexample to the author’s proposal – as knowing seems to be more directly linked to tasting than to seeing, at least in this group of languages – is cursorily dismissed without further justification. Sweetser (pp. 36-37) goes on to say that “[i]n general, the target domains of smell and taste are not the intellectual domain of savoir, however.” After a brief consideration of English expressions of taste, she concludes that “[t]aste, however, is a physical sense

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which seems universally to be linked to personal likes and dislikes in the mental world. Lat. gustis and Fr. goût, like English taste, may indicate a ‘taste’ in clothing or art as well as in food” (p. 37). No mention is made of the relation of this sense of taste with the main topic of her discussion. Similarly, “the sense of touch is not only linked with general sense perception, but is also closely tied to emotional ‘feeling’” (p. 37) but the author’s comments do not go any farther. It may seem very strange indeed that such a cursory and tattily constructed analysis of a few verbs in a few languages, lacking any systematicity, may have become the basis for most discussions on the topic. It has even become a kind of “dogma” that languages conceptualise knowledge metaphorically by means of the metaphor seeing is knowing, all the others being dismissed as secondary and probably uninteresting; as Matlock wrote, the equivalent metaphor with hearing instead of seeing is not very productive. Or is it? Since the publication of the works we have discussed – much too briefly – a number of studies have shown that the assumed universal value and primacy of seeing is knowing has too many counterexamples to be retained as such. Evans and Wilkins (2000, p. 546) studied ca. 60 Australian aboriginal languages and found that “Australian languages recruit verbs of cognition like ‘think’ and ‘know’ from ‘hear’, but not from ‘see’” and, consequently, they considered as disproved Sweetser’s suggestion that “vision has primacy as the modality from which verbs of higher intellection, such as ‘knowing’ and ‘thinking,’ are recruited, and proposes that verbs meaning ‘hear’ would not take on these readings, although they often extend to mean ‘understand’ or ‘obey’.” They add an additional point of special interest for the purposes of this chapter:

We argue that the same semantic domain can have its universal and its relativistic side, a foot in nature and a foot in culture, and conclude by demonstrating that there are good social and cultural reasons driving the extension of “hearing”, but not “seeing”, to “know” and “think” in Australian Aboriginal societies. (Evans & Wilkins, 2000, p. 546)

Evans and Wilkins, therefore, favour the consideration of culture in the study of this topic, something Sweetser did not pay any attention to.4 Ibarretxe-Antuñano (2008; 2013) adds other languages that also favour hearing over seeing: Suya, Desana (both in South America), Ommura (New

4 Sweetser’s book (1990) bears the subtitle Metaphorical and Cultural Aspects of Semantic Structure but a treatment, even minimal, of culture cannot be found anywhere in the book; the term culture does not even appear in the index.

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Guinea), Sedang Moy (Indochina). More can be added. For instance, the ENW Ecuadorian language Cha’palaachi has a verb base mi-ha- meaning ‘to know’, whose root is the same as in me-(ra)- ‘to hear, listen’ and bears no relationship with the verb for ‘to see,’ i.e. que-(re)- (Lindskoog & Lindsksoog, 1964; Bernárdez, in preparation). Guerrero (2011) presents new results on the importance of hearing vs. seeing in the whole Uto-Aztecan language family. There does not seem to exist any reason for considering the sense of hearing as less significant than that of seeing in the human acquisition of knowledge; strangely enough, results proving this point are usually readily dismissed. This reminds us of the tendency to refer to phenomena not fitting in the standard, “accepted” framework, as being “culture-specific,” an expression devoid of any meaning, as shown in Bernárdez (2013).5 In other languages, a preference towards touching or smelling is visible: Ibarretxe- Antuñano (2008; 2013) reports on the role of smell among the Ongee Andamanese and the Johai from Malaysia, whereas the Central-American Tzotzil favour touch and the Shipibo-Konibo from Peru use a whole array of senses to make sense of the world. Ibarretxe-Antuñano (2013) raises an extremely important point that is seldom discussed: the presence of a metaphor in a language, e. g. seeing is knowing, is not just a matter of yes or no: the same metaphor can exist in two different languages but with much higher frequency in Language A than in Language B; that is, holding a higher position (in linguistic and cultural terms) in A than in B. Through a corpus analysis, Ibarretxe-Antuñano shows that this metaphor is much more frequent and pervasive in English than in Spanish or Basque.6 One of Ibarretxe-Antuñano’s (2013) conclusions is very similar to Evans and Wilkins’ proposal:

Based on the general (wrong) belief that some primary metaphors such as understanding is seeing are universal, it has been shown

5 This reminds the author of the use of ethno- as a prefix pointing to what does not fit in the standard, dominant model: whatever kind of (pop, rock etc.) music which does not follow the patterns of Anglo-Saxon pop music is termed ethnic (from Flamenco to Pygmy, classical Hindu or Balinese music!). Any kind of food not following the patterns of Western, mainly Anglo-Saxon types of food (especially the kind usually termed “fast food”) is characterised as ethnic food, whether it is Greek, Scandinavian, Indian or whatever. Another consequence of la pensée unique (Bernárdez, 2008; Hagège, 2012). 6 Similar results turn out in Materinskaja’s (2005) analysis of terms related to body-parts in English, German, Ukrainian and Russian. Metaphoric extension was far more frequent in English than in any of the other languages. In fact, English seems to have a very special liking for figurative language that deserves special consideration: it is probably a cultural feature.

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that other languages do not necessarily rely on vision but on other senses such as hearing or smell for cognition metaphors, and therefore, proving the need of culture in conceptual metaphor theory.

3. Conceptual metaphor and culture

Although our preceding discussion is much too short and general, as the complete analysis of the positions involved is not the main topic of the present chapter, we can draw the following conclusions: (1) The absolute primacy of the metaphorical extension seeing is knowing, as opposed to hearing is knowing, etc., does not hold cross-linguistically. (2) The reason has to lie in the cultural co-determination of meanings, meaning-change and, most importantly in this context, metaphoric extension and conceptual metaphor. From many fronts the evidence is constantly mounting: conceptual metaphor and metaphoric extension cannot be properly understood in the absence of cultural considerations. It may seem odd – and of ideological, philosophical and sociological interest – that some very significant cognitive linguists have apparently changed their minds from a previous view of metaphor+culture to a purely neural approach, as Guignard (2012, p. 89) points out. This neural- shift is clearly visible in the proposal of “primary metaphors” that was made reference to above.

4. Seeing, hearing, and evidentiality

Evidentiality is one of those linguistic terms that have suffered the tendency to change the well-established meaning of words in linguistics by assigning them new meanings that topple down everything previously known on the corresponding topic. It was first used to mark certain grammatical, mainly morphological constructions in verbs, especially in Amerindian languages. Nowadays, it is seen as a purely conceptual category found in most, if not all languages. The original meaning of the term has been altered with the result that all languages now seem to express evidentiality.7 The “traditional” definition can be found in Aikhenvald (2004, p. 3): “Evidentiality is a linguistic

7 Which is fine, of course, although it might have been clearer to create new terms for new notions instead of sticking to the old one in a now unrecognisable sense.

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category whose primary meaning is source of information.” Peterson, Déchaine, and Sauerland’s (2010, p. 1) definition is a bit different: “Broadly speaking, evidentiality is the expression of the source of evidence for a proposition. Cross-linguistically, different morphological means are used to express evidentiality.” Boye & Harder (2009, p. 9) interpret evidentiality in a merely conceptual way: “We argue that evidentiality should be understood basically as a functional-conceptual substance domain.” The following definition, by Diewald & Smirnova (2010, p. 40), is closer to Boye and Harder’s than to Aikhenvald’s: “It is common ground among linguists8 that evidentiality is a semantic and functional domain, which, like temporality or modality, may be expressed by lexical or grammatical means” and “The term evidential expression is a neutral label (a hypernym) used to denote any kind of linguistic string with evidential meaning in a particular context, regardless of its linguistic structure and degree of grammaticalization” (p. 41). This definition is at the basis of the papers included in Diewald & Smirnova (eds., 2010b), on the linguistic realization of evidentiality in European languages. The situation is rather sad, as terms that are relatively – or quite – stable acquire new meanings in an indiscriminate way, thus adding to the persistent terminological confusion that plagues linguistics. A solution could be found if “dimensions and continua” like those proposed by Hans-Jakob Seiler are used instead of the all-or-none approach still favoured among most linguists. Thus, a view of evidentiality could be proposed where morphological evidentiality would occupy one end of the continuum, purely lexical evidentiality the opposite one, the morphology-syntactic-semantic (but also pragmatic) distinctions occupying different positions within the continuum. Unfortunately linguists do not usually seem to like proposals advanced by members of other schools of thinking. Aikhenvald (2004, p. 360) specifies the entrenchment of evidentiality in languages where the category is morphologically and systematically marked:

Having obligatory evidentials implies being precise in stating one’s information source. […] Failure to demonstrate one’s competence in the use of evidentials or a breach of evidential conventions may inflict a blow to the speaker’s reputations and stature as a responsible and valued member of the community. [...] Those who speak a language with evidentiality find it hard to adjust to the vagueness of information source

8 We think this type of statement should be avoided unless adequately qualified. Who, how many, and where are those linguists?

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in many familiar European languages – such as English, Portuguese, and varieties of Spanish other than those spoken in the Andes.9

Accordingly, evidentiality is not at all the same in Quechua and in English: in the first language you just cannot leave it out and if you do, your partners will feel a bit at a loss: “how do you know?” might be an immediate reaction. Anyway, as evidentiality – in its new definitions – can be found everywhere, in any language, books and articles have been and are being published on the topic in the most diverse languages; suffice it to mention such collections of papers as Aikhenvald & Dixon (2003), Diewald & Smirnova (2010b), Marín-Arrese (2004), Peterson & Sauerland (2010). We cannot deal with even a minimal part of the theoretical and descriptive problems of evidentiality in this chapter. We touch on it here because the opposition of hearing vs. seeing verbs in their epistemic sense, as a consequence of metaphoric extension, has been related to evidentiality. That is the case e.g. of Matlock (1989, p. 215):

Languages generally distinguish between direct versus indirect experience. Direct experience includes a speaker’s direct visual, auditory or other sensory experience of a situation. Indirect experience includes reported information (typically hearsay), and inferred information (typically observation of end results). Crosslinguistically, there is natural hierarchy of evidentials which correlates directness of experience to certainty of knowledge: direct experience corresponds to a high degree of certainty, indirect experience of the reported type corresponds to less certainty, and indirect experience of the inferred type corresponds to even less certainty.

Everything in this quotation seems more or less true although the statement is marred by the absence of any quoted evidence supporting such expressions as “languages generally distinguish” or “cross-linguistically.” Again, we are not going to enter into a theoretical discussion that would lead us away from the central purpose of the paper. Suffice it to say that the central notion in an

9 In fact, the Spanish Pluperfect is systematically used in Andean Spanish as the equivalent of the Quechua -sqa suffix, marking mirativity, a category related to evidentiality. The extended use of dizque and similar forms to mark information as indirectly achieved is another example of how speakers of language with clearly morphologically marked, obligatory evidential systems used Spanish constructions, altering their meaning to reproduce the evidentiality they “felt” was absent in Spanish, i.e., to fill a gap they identified in the European language.

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explanation like that, viz. knowledge, is very far from being as obvious and well-defined as it is usually thought to be (a conviction reflected in it not being defined). McCready (2010) analyses the topic in connection with evidentiality, whereas Starmans and Friedman (2012) theoretically and experimentally investigate the difference between the “philosophical” view of knowledge and its folk counterpart, which functions in a very different way. Cognitive linguists use philosophical and scientific definitions much too frequently, thus going back in many cases to an “objectivist” view of language and meaning contradicting some of the main tenets of the discipline (as stated especially in Lakoff, 1987). In this case, using a philosophical understanding of knowledge risks leading linguists astray: speakers are no philosophers. Nichols (2004, p. 514) makes a similar point; according to her,

Analytic philosophers have long used a priori methods to characterize folk concepts such as knowledge, belief and wrongness. Recently, researchers have begun to exploit social scientific methodologies to characterize such folk concepts. One line of work has explored folk intuitions with cases that are disputed within philosophy. A second approach, with potentially more radical implications, applies the methods of cross-cultural psychology to philosophical intuitions. Recent work in this area suggests that people in different cultures have systematically different intuitions surrounding folk concepts.

It is unfortunate that cognitive linguists, who are sometimes a bit careless with the definition of their scientific terms, usually ignore such problems, i.e., they tend to take very complex, disputed terms as if they were crystal-clear and undisputed. Of special interest for us in this paper is the following argument by Aikhenvald (2004, pp. 361-362):

Each evidential is associated with a certain information source. Different types of traditional knowledge and experience come to be associated with conventionalized sources. For instance, dreams can be treated on a par with directly witnessed observed reality […]. Or they can be represented as being outside conscious reality, and cast in reported or in non-firsthand evidential […]. The choice of evidential in a dream may depend on who the dreamer is: dreams by ordinary humans in Tucano and Tariana are cast in non-visual evidential […]. However, shamanic dreams are couched in visual evidential. Shamans are traditionally considered omniscient and they “see” what other humans do not. […] In Shipibo- Konibo, shamanic visions under the influence of ayahuasca […] are cast in direct evidential – unlike dreams experienced by humans. Such visions are part of a tangible reality: the shaman “sees” what others do not.

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It is obvious that Aikhenvald sees the question of knowledge from an anthropological perspective, i.e., one that sees culture – in the senses in which the word is understood in anthropology – as an inextricable part of the linguistic phenomenon termed evidentiality. Her view coincides thus with the ones expressed by both Ibarretxe-Antuñano and Evans and Wilkins. And we should also include many other linguists within the already well-established field of “cultural linguistics.” All this is explicitly recognized and developed by Bartmiński (2009/2012) in his Cognitive Ethnolinguistics, which sets its focus on the spoken language and makes widespread use of real-language corpora, complete texts, and text fragments, instead of constructed, isolated sentences. Of course, if only the standard, written language is taken into account, it may be impossible to obtain access to the worldview of its speakers, in the same way that it will be at least very difficult to analyze the relationship between language and culture. Such an essential concept in Cognitive Ethnolinguistics as value is pervasive in the common language and thus provides access to the culture: “By values I mean that which in the light of language and culture people consider precious. [...] [M]y understanding of values is that of folk philosophy” (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 39).

5. Questions to be answered

The discussions above have provided us with a few tools that should be useful for the analysis of the Icelandic verbs heyra and sjá and the roles and peculiarities of their so-called metaphoric extensions. The following questions will have to be answered:

(1) Does the difference between sjá and heyra correspond to the proposals, or predictions, of the – let us call it thus – standard theory summarized above? Is sjá, “seeing,” prioritized? Does sjá express direct perception and knowledge while heyra expresses indirect perception? And, even more importantly, does the corresponding correlation hold, viz. direct (sjá) → higher certainty, indirect (heyra) → lesser certainty? (2) Is it necessary – and/or inevitable – to use conceptual metaphor to understand and to explain the epistemic meaning of these two verbs? In other words, is the lexical analysis in terms of a – let’s call it thus for the sake of brevity – prototypical core and a number of metaphoric and/or metonymic extensions inescapable? (3) Does culture play any role in the process? And if this is the case, how can cultural elements be integrated in the analysis and what is gained in doing so?

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To try to answer these questions, the uses of both verbs were observed and analyzed in a considerably large and varied Icelandic corpus.10 No quantitative analysis was carried out, as it would not add anything of special interest to the purpose of this chapter, which is of a qualitative nature.

6. The analysis of heyra and sjá

The basic meaning of the two verbs we are considering was briefly introduced above for Icelandic.

6.1 Basic meaning

There is no need to discuss the “non-figurative use” of the verbs in any detail. Suffice it to recall that the basic meaning of both is the physical, real perception of objects, events etc. That is, cases like the following (from Íslensk Orðabók, 2007): ég sé flugvélina ‘I see the airplane’ and hann sá mig koma ‘he saw me come.’ Instances like sjá vel ‘to see well’ (i.e. to have good sight) are also included here. Similarly for heyra: heyra song ‘to hear a song’ and, although not included in Íslensk Orðabók, also hann heyrði hann koma ‘he heard him come’ and heyra vel ‘to hear well.’ It is important to bear in mind, however, that the dictionaries provide us with all the “figurative” senses; this means that they are fully entrenched. Given this, does it really pay, or is it really sensible, to posit a “core meaning” that is then metaphorically developed? From a historical point of view, such a view is obviously valid, as a way to trace the evolution from one “concrete” meaning to more abstract senses. But from a synchronic perspective, it seems that metaphor

10 As no electronically standardized corpus exists, the following partial corpora were used: (a) the Íslenskt Textasafn, the biggest corpus in existence, by the University of Iceland and the Árni Magnússon Foundation, which includes written texts but also, differently from all other corpora, spoken conversations. It includes texts from all periods and genres (http://www.lexis.hi.is/corpus/leit.pl); (b) the whole text of all the Icelandic sagas and þættir, as accessible in electronic form through snara.is; (c) the text of fourteen novels by Halldór Laxness, also in snara.is.; (d) the electronic texts from different periods and genres in Netútgáfan (http://www.snerpa.is/net/); (e) sundry texts from different periods and genres consulted in their printed form, usually in a partial form only. The dictionaries used are mentioned in the corresponding places, but the main ones are those referred to in the first section of this paper. Also, and in order to allow for a comparative element, Danish was also considered, although not to the same depth as Icelandic. In addition to the dictionaries mentioned above examples taken from materials in printed form were considered. Additionally, the new Old Norse Dictionary in the Net was checked (www.onp. humku.dk), which provides large numbers of citations.

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does not play any role at all: the speakers have at their disposal a number of senses, or maybe different words.11 While we will not enter into a detailed discussion here, we will make reference to the Career of Metaphor Hypothesis (Bowdle & Gentner, 2005), which provides a path to a correct understanding of this problem. What may be clear is that for the speakers, the different senses of heyra and sjá are internally coherent. We can say that for the Icelanders, there exists a link between the physical process of hearing/seeing and the process of acquisition of knowledge. We shall come back to this.

6.2 The epistemic senses of heyra

The most frequent use of heyra is of course the physical process of hearing. In a number of cases the physical process is not explicit but just inferred or altogether out of the question. The meaning is then epistemic, usually ‘getting to know.’ Heyra is used to indicate that something has been heard of, that some information has come to our ears; that is, that our knowledge is indirect and that the spoken word is the medium.

(1) “Þetta var það skrítnasta sem ég hef nýlega heyrt,” sagði systir mín (Benedikt Gröndal, Grasaferð) “This was the strangest that I had recently heard,” said sister mine.12

The information can be inferred from what has been said; in (2)-(4) reference is made to some persons’ mood from the sound of their voice:

(2) Hann hafði heyrt í hvílíku uppnámi hún var í gegnum símann. (Óttar M. Norðfjörð, Sólkross, p. 250) He had heard in which commotion she was in through the-telephone.13

11 The issue of polysemy in connection with the verbs of perception is dealt with in detail by Ibarretexe-Antuñano (1999, 2003). 12 The English glosses are not translations proper so they lack any idiomaticity. Their only function is to allow the reader to understand the Icelandic sentence, which is reproduced literally, word-by-word. When proper understanding is difficult, a real “translation” is added. 13 The hyphenated articles, as in the-telephone, reflect the Icelandic postposed suffix: síma-nn (the Nordic languages use definite suffixes instead of definite articles as English, Spanish etc.).

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(3) Erlendi brá að heyra örvæntinguna í röddinni. (Arnaldur Indriðason, Vetrarborgin, p. 114) Erlendur was-shocked to hear the-desperation in the-voice.

(4) “Já, eflaust,” sagði læknirinn og var ekki að heyra að hann legði trúnað á þetta (Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, Auðin, p. 103) “Yes, certainly,” said the-doctor and was not to hear that he put confidence on this. “Yes, certainly,” said the doctor, and it could he heard that he had no confidence in it.

In (5) (5) ég er búin að heyra svo mikið um Ekvador ég væri alveg til í að fara þangað (Textasafn: Spoken language) I am finished to hear so much about Ecuador I would-be absolutely for in to travel there. I have heard so much about Ecuador that I would be in favour of going there.

it is at least doubtful that the information has been acquired through hearing, i.e., from other people’s telling. In other instances of the epistemic sense ‘to get information,’ it can be assumed that such information will probably be gained through someone else‘s spoken words, although it is not necessarily so:

(6) Ég heyri að hann er vel að sér. (Auður Ava, Afleggjarinn, p. 218) I hear that he is good at himself. (i.e., that he is competent)

No indication as to the precise source of information is given, although it is assumed that this type of personal information is usually acquired through the spoken medium; or at least, through letters, text messages, etc. Other examples of personal information having been “heard,” i.e., known, are (7)-(9):

(7) Þú hefur heyrt um Marion, sagði maðurinn (Arnaldur Indriðason, Kleifarvatn, p. 88) You have heard of Marion, said the-man.

(8) Hefurðu heyrt í Þorláki? spyr ég. (Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir, Afleggjarinn, p. 179) Have you heard of Þorlákur? ask I.

(9) Elínborg var að gefa út kokkabók, þú hefur kannski heyrt af því (Arnaldur Indriðason, Kleifarvatn, p. 139) Elínborg was to give out cookbook, you have perhaps heard of it.

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The “hearing” can be secondary, even doubtful, as in (10):

(10) Þjóðin á rétt á að heyra fréttirnar... (Óttar M. Norðfjörð, Sólkross, p. 75) The-people have right on to hear the-news.

This does not only refer to hearing but to acquiring information through the media, which can happen through written or audiovisual media, as is also the case of (11):

(11) ég hef aðeins heyrt um það í fjölmiðlum (Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, Þriðja táknið, p. 17) I have only heard about that in (the) media.

where the word fjölmiðill (here in the dative plural) can refer to printed or audio- visual media. The meaning of ‘getting to know’ is clear in the following instances, independently of the existence of audition:

(12) Ég efast um að þú myndir vilja heyra það, sagði Andrés. Ég efast um að nokkur vilji heyra neitt um svoleiðis lagaðan djöfulskap. (Arnaldur Indriðason, Vetrarborgin, p. 127) I doubt about that you would like hear that, said Andrés. I doubt about that anyone like hear anything about such characterised madness.

(13) Ég hef heyrt fjöldann allan af sögum af fjölskyldum sem hafa farið í rándýra sólarlanda (Textasafn: spoken language) I have heard the-multitude all of stories of families that travelled to extremely-expensive sunny-countries. I have heard lots and lots of stories about families who travelled to those incredibly expensive sunny countries.

(14) Ég hef heyrt að ekki sé hægt að fara hraðar en á ljóshraða. (Textasafn) I have heard that not is possible to travel faster than on speed-of- light.

The following are rather extreme, as hearing is absolutely out of the question; the meaning is only ‘get to know’:

(15) Hannes segir ekkert. En ég heyri hann hugsa hratt. (Árni Þórarinsson: Tími nornarinnar, p. 208) Hannes says nothing. But I hear him think quickly.

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(16) Ég heyri hvernig hann veltir vöngum. (Árni þórarinsson: Tími nornarinnar, p. 310) I hear how he mulls-over-it.

What is heard need not be “audible”; in (17) reference is made to ideas, thoughts, and the only way to “hear” it is indirectly:

(17) og aldrei áður heyrt þvílíkar skoðanir. (Halldór Laxness, Brekkukotsannáll, p. 226) and never before heard such views (i.e., points of view)

Sometimes, the difference between heyra and sjá is explicitly stated:

(18) Ég sá það ekki, ég bara heyrði það, sagði hann. (Arnaldur Indriðason, Vetrarborgin, p. 207) I saw it not, I only heard it, said he.

(19) Það sama á við um það sem við sjáum og heyrum. (Textasafn) The same is on about that which we see and hear. The same holds for what we see and hear.

A contrast between heyra and vita ‘to know’ is apparent in (20); the opposition is between the “state of knowing” and the “source of knowledge”, which, in the case of heyra, is not guaranteed (this is a clear case of “hearsay”):

(20) Ég veit það ekki, sagði Raggi. Ég bara heyrði þetta. (Arnaldur Indriðason, Vetrarborgin, p. 207) I know that not, I only heard that, said he.

A triple contrast, sjá, heyra and vita exists in (21):

(21) Ja, eitthvað sér hún, heyrir eða veit meira en við (Árni þórarinsson: Tími nornarinnar, p. 99) Well, something sees she, hears or knows more than we. Well, she sees, hears or knows more than we do.

(22) on the other hand offers an example of two different sources of knowledge: to read and to hear:

(22) Allt sem þau höfðu lesið, allt sem þau höfðu heyrt, var satt. (Arnaldur Indriðason, Kleifarvatn, p. 23) Everything that they had read, everything that they had heard, was true.

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6.3 A brief digression on ‘to hear’ in Danish

Danish shows some uses similar to those in Icelandic, as evidenced by the following examples:

(23) Jeg kan sletikke se, at der er nogen Grænse mellem Naturen og Mennesket. (Karen Blixen, Breve 1931-1962, Vol. II, p. 213) I can absolutely-not see, that there is any limit between the-nature and the-person (human being).

This is of course inaccessible to vision as such, so the meaning is simply ‘understand.’ The source of knowledge can be something unrelated to hearing and sound, as when reference is made to written materials:

(24) Som vi siden skal høre, stemmer denne datering også overens med… (P. V. Glob: Mosefolket, p. 36) As we later shall hear, coincides this dating also completely with…

The author is referring to a point in his book, where the dating is mentioned anew.

(25) Jeg har tænkt meget paa Dem og var glad ved at høre fra Dem. (Karen Blixen, Breve 1931-1962, Vol. II, p. 289) I have thought much of you and was glad with to hear from you.

As she is referring to letters and information obtained through that medium, there is no real “hearing” here. As in Icelandic, source information of a personal nature is usually referred to with ‘to hear.’ Again, as in Icelandic, ‘to see’ and ‘to hear’ can be contrasted explicitly:

(26) Mangen En har enten selv seet, eller hørt gamle Folk tale om Pæle, staaende hist og her... (P. V. Glob, Mosefolket, p. 60, quoting a newspaper article from 1839) Many one has or self seen or heard old people talk about stakes standing here and there… Many people have seen with their own eyes or heard old people talk of stakes that stand here and there…

Finally, it has to be added that the non-literal or more precisely “non-auditory” use of heyra is of low frequency if compared with the equivalent use of sjá. For instance, in a contemporary novel like Jón Kalman’s Himnaríki og helvíti there are

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only four instances of non-auditory heyra in its over 200 pages. Even these four occurrences can be interpreted as referring – although not in an explicit manner – to things being said. Something similar happens in Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir’s Afleggjarinn: eleven instances in 272 pages. In the sagas it is difficult to find examples of heyra not connected with audition. We may venture that the explanation lies in the objectivity of the style and especially in the saga authors’ limitation to what was the object of direct perception and experience for the characters in the narrative.

6.4 Some conclusions from the lexical analysis

This short analysis, centred on heyra, allows us to draw some preliminary conclusions. (a) The priority of sjá with the sense ‘to get to know,’ ‘to understand,’ etc. seems clear. Both its frequency (which has not been the object of scrutiny in this chapter, though, so this is only a general impression) and the range of its occurrences show that it is seen as the main medium for acquiring knowledge. (b) There exists a clear “division of linguistic labor” between sjá and heyra, in accordance to the standard proposals in the domain of evidentiality. Heyra is used to signal information acquired in an indirect way, independently of the existence or sound: it can be acquired from sounds, from our inferences on the basis of sounds, but also from the media, i.e., from written or spoken texts. What is important here is the fact that we access the information in a mediated way, not directly. This confirms most proposals made within the domain of evidentiality, as summarised above. On the other hand, sjá stands for information that is, or may have been, or may be (e.g. through inference) acquired directly, without the need for any mediation. (c) This division of labor does not imply, however, that the information gained from seeing is in any way better or more precise than the information expressed with heyra. The verb of hearing, however – as evident in (18) and (20) – includes a certain idea that the source can be less reliable than we thought. But the same can happen with sjá, as in

(27) hann þóttist sjá að Gísli taldi sér vísan dauðann (Þorgill Gjallandi, Við sólhvörf) he thought (he) saw that Gísli considered himself really dead

where þóttist sjá indicates doubt on the reliability of the character’s vision. This construction, by the way, is extremely frequent, both with sjá and with heyra: hann þóttist heyra ‘he thought that he heard’ introduces a clear hint of uncertainty: maybe he heard wrong. This means, by the way, that the unreliability

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of perception is equally possible in both verbs; the only “negative advantage” of heyra in this sense is that a double possibility of error exists. But it cannot be said that, as an essential part of their difference in epistemic meaning, heyra marks per se less reliable information. The second part of Matlock’s proposal above seems thus disconfirmed in the case of Icelandic (and Danish).

7. Heyra and sjá from a cultural perspective

As stated at the beginning of this chapter, metaphoric extension has to include a cultural component. This is true, in fact, not only of metaphor but of everything having to do with meaning, as language is essentially a cultural product (Bernárdez, 2008b). This should also be true of such apparently “neutral” concepts as seeing and hearing. An adequate framework for the incorporation of cultural elements in the study of meaning – and of language at large – is formed by the views that can be termed “socio-historical,” ultimately based on the seminal work of Lev Vygotsky and his school from the 1920’s and 30’s. Bernárdez’ (2007b; 2008a; 2008b) proposal of synergic or collective cognition incorporating culture and history in the study of cognition and language goes in this same direction. A useful notion in the same tradition is that of the “linguistic worldview” as proposed by a number of authors.14 We shall use this concept as defined by Bartmiński (2009/2012, p. 23) in the framework of Cognitive Ethnolinguistics:

Linguistic worldview is a language-entrenched interpretation of reality, which can be expressed in the form of judgements about the world, people, things, or events. It is an interpretation, not a reflection; it is a portrait without claims to fidelity, not a photograph of real objects.

As Kopińska (2009, p. 64) writes, “[t]he linguistic view of our world is a recording of all the possible interactions of human beings with reality: the establishment of the hierarchies, organisation and classification of the world around us.”

14 Kopińska (2009) is a useful review of the concept as used in different linguistic traditions in Europe and the U.S. On the other hand, Zinken (2004) compares Conceptual Metaphor Theory and cognitive linguistics with the main tenets and methods of cognitive ethnolinguistics. (Incidentally, Zinken uses the term linguistic picture of the world, not linguistic worldview. This term corresponds better to both the Polish and Russian terms, although here we follow the established term in English. For a discussion of terminology, cf. Tabakowska this volume.)

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If we consider the senses of the Icelandic verbs heyra and sjá as sketched above, the possibility of looking at them from the vantage point of the “Icelandic worldview” comes to mind. In fact, heyra does not only refer to the physical process of perceiving sounds, but also to the listener’s making sense of those sounds, i.e., interpreting them. The same holds for sjá. Now, culturally there are many ways of making sense of sensorial inputs and they are culturally marked. A beautiful illustration was provided by Aikhenvald as reproduced in the quotation above (Section 4), where the differences in such an apparently straightforward notion as “visual evidence” depending on the “seers” and their socio-cultural status. Even the distinction of hearing and seeing seems not to be universal, as Maslova (2004) shows for the case of Kolyma Yukaghir, where the historically basic verb is ‘hearing,’ later developing to the meaning of ‘seeing.’ What seems natural and not in need of any further qualification may seem significantly cultural, as has also been shown through experimental research (Davidoff, Fonteneau, & Goldstein, 2008). In the case of Icelandic, the split of heyra and sjá as markers of respectively mediated and non-mediated acquisition of knowledge brings to mind two essential features of the Icelandic language that are firmly entrenched in Icelandic culture: (3) the specification of the “degree of certainty” in knowledge and (2) the sources of action. The first point is reflected in the vast array of expressions marking whether something is seen as sure, just possible, improbable, etc. There is no room here to enter into this topic – but consider example (26) above – which will be the subject of a future paper. As to the second point, Icelandic even has a special construction, termed “the unconscious, irresponsible construction” (Bernárdez, 2007a) to signify the situation in which someone carries out an involuntary action that leads him/her to a certain perception or a certain idea (i.e., a physical-sensorial or a mental interpretation of the world), as in:

(28) Rétt áðan varð mér litið í spegil, og VOILÀ! … sá mig. Mér alvarlega varð litið í spegilinn og sjá brjálaðar krullur prýða mitt fagra höfuð. (googled example) Just a minute ago I happened to look at the mirror and VOILÀ! … (I) saw me. I really happened to look at the mirror and saw some crazy curls decorating my beautiful head.

The speaker did not intend to look at the mirror: there is no entity responsible for that action, which leads Bruno Kress (1982, p. 150) to define this very little studied construction in the following terms: “sie deutet an, daß die betreffende Aktion von einer magischen Kraft ausgeht” (it indicates that the corresponding action goes out from some magic force; emphasis E.B.). This is perfectly possible in a traditional culture where belief in elves and trolls is still alive, but we prefer to appeal to some uncontrolled force in general – be it some magical being or

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just sheer chance. This construction is mainly – nearly exclusively – used with only a few verbs, basically líta ‘look,’ huga ‘think,’ bregða ‘be startled,’ ganga ‘go,’ especially the first two. The corresponding processes, led by that “mysterious” force, bring about a situation where something of special interest is perceived or thought, or a place is trodden. A similar example (also googled) is (29):

(29) Okkur varð hugsað til Stebba Páls. We came/happened to think of S.P.

The process of thinking was not intentional: Stebba Páll just “flew into our minds.” Also in (30):

(30) Á ítalíuárunum varð mér oft hugsað: … (Guðbergur Bergsson, Lömuðu kennslukonurnar, p. 115) In my Italian years, I often happened to think: …

There was a recurrent but always unprovoked and unexpected thinking. All this forms part of the Icelandic linguistic worldview. It was a traditional society that underwent significant changes only in the second part of the 20th c.; atmospheric conditions made people stay practically isolated for long periods of time, and lack of light during the winter months limited the value and especially the reliability of visual perception. At the same time the only way to know about things happening out of visual reach was through somebody else’s information, which frequently – but not always – took place through the oral channel. In the same way that it was necessary to specify the reasons for one’s own actions, it was essential to specify the source of one’s knowledge. And even in the Middle Ages, reading sagas and telling stories was a part of Icelandic everyday life: written texts read aloud for the benefit of the members of the household. A large system of epistemic nuances, including the medial voice, the so-called impersonal expressions, etc., allows a speaker to know whether the information received – directly or indirectly – is reliable and to which extent. Another system is devoted to specifying the source of knowledge. Both together enable the Icelanders to feel as safe as possible in their lives. Both processes allow them to interpret the reality that surrounds them (to retake Kopińska’s words above) and be able to behave in the most adequate way possible, and also to move around safely – in all senses, literal and figurative. This leads us to a final point, which is the “cognitive definition” of heyra and sjá in terms of Cognitive Ethnolinguistics. It is defined as follows: “The cognitive definition aims to portray the way in which an entity is viewed by the speakers of a language, to represent socio-culturally established and linguistically

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entrenched knowledge, its categorisation and valuation. […] The defined entity is a ‘mental object’, a projection, not a reflection of the real-life artefact…” (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 67; emphasis E.B.). We can then define the two Icelandic verbs as follows: Heyra is ‘the process of extracting the information available in a set of sounds, etc., provided by a different person, natural being or force, etc.’ In the case of humans (and of animals in the world of fairy-tales) the information is transmitted by someone who may, but need not, have (had) personal access to it and who transmits it faithfully. The information may be transmitted by someone else through some other, non-auditory, channel. The basic meaning is then to receive information through the mediation of someone else who is supposed to know, and who usually, but not always and not necessarily, transmits it through an audible channel. Of course, in Icelandic culture this was extremely important and frequent, as everything having happened away from the speaker had to be acquired in such mediated form. On the other hand, sjá is ‘the process of extracting the information available in a set of visual stimuli.’ Mediation is here excluded.15 Are these meanings – or senses – of the two verbs a case of metaphoric extension? As shown above, they are fully entrenched, are of common occurrence and can be considered as the main epistemic verbs marking the source of knowledge. More detailed research has to be carried out including all the derivatives, all other forms of expression of the notions ‘seeing’ and ‘hearing,’ and their use in complete texts.

8. Conclusions

We must now try to answer the questions posed at the beginning. Let us reproduce them here, in an abbreviated form, together with the answers provided by the research in this chapter. (1) Does sjá express direct perception and knowledge whereas heyra expresses indirect perception? Does the corresponding correlation hold, viz. direct (sjá) → higher certainty, indirect (heyra) → lesser certainty? The priority of sjá seems confirmed; a quantitative analysis would make it clearer, but there seems to be no doubt that ‘seeing’ is a “better source” for knowledge than ‘hearing,’ as there is no danger of double distortion, as in heyra, which refers to knowledge transmitted by someone else (distortion can be double: the teller

15 Compare Bartmiński’s (2009/2012: 96-116) detailed analysis of SEEING in Polish: also in this language, SEEING is much more than merely ‘perceiving light through one’s eyes.’

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learned about the fact in an incorrect way, and/or the receiver may understand the message incorrectly). But the difference in certainty is disconfirmed; if such difference exists, it plays a very secondary role. The important point is the type of source, not the degree of confidence. (2) Is it necessary to use conceptual metaphor to explain the epistemic meaning of these two verbs? As has been shown above, metaphorical extensions are just a matter of language history. Synchronically, the “metaphoric” meanings or senses are so well entrenched that it makes no sense to try and see them in metaphoric terms. A lexical analysis in the terms of the cognitive definitions and the stereotypes as defined in the Lublin School of Cognitive Ethnolinguistics16 seems much more useful and fits the mental reality of the speakers much better. (3) Does culture play any role in the process? As we have had the opportunity to see, culture does indeed play a very significant role, to such extent that neither ‘seeing’ nor ‘hearing’ are simple “physical and physiological phenomena.” They occupy a position in the “Icelandic linguistic worldview” forming a vast system that organises the Icelanders’ need to know the source of knowledge and actions, as well as the degree of certainty in what they learn, irrespective of the source. Icelandic is not alone in this organisation of vision and audition in its culture. We had a brief opportunity to consider some similarities in the use of these two verbs in Danish; it could also be extended to other Germanic languages… probably with the partial exception of English. There remains much research to do on this topic in the Northern European languages and elsewhere.

16 Zinken (2004, p. 116) on stereotypes: “Stereotypes are the ‘building blocks’ of the linguistic picture of the world. […] Stereotyping is regarded a general mechanism of organising knowledge about entities (objects, acts, relations) in the world.”

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Bartmiński, Jerzy. (2009/2012). Aspects of Cognitive Ethnolinguistics. Ed. Jörg Zinken. Sheffield and Oakville, CT: Equinox.

Bernárdez, Enrique. (2007a). The UNCONSCIOUS, IRRESPONSIBLE CONSTRUCTION in Modern Icelandic. In Christopher S. Butler, Raquel Hidalgo Downing, & Julia Lavid (Eds.), Functional Perspectives on Grammar and Discourse (pp. 149-164). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Bernárdez, Enrique. (2007b). Synergy in the construction of meaning. In Małgorzata Fabiszak (Ed.), Language and Meaning (pp. 15-37). Frankfurt a.M: Peter Lang.

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Bernárdez, Enrique. (2008b). El lenguaje como cultura. Madrid: Alianza.

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Bernárdez, Enrique. (in preparation). Lengua y cultura cayapas: Cha’palaachi.

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Bowdle, Brian F., & Gentner, Dedre. (2005). The career of metaphor. Psychological Review, 112 (1), 193-216.

Boye, Kasper, & Harder, Peter. (2009). Evidentiality. Linguistic categories and grammaticalization. Functions of Language, 16 (1), 9-43.

Davidoff, Jules, Fonteneau, Elisabeth, & Goldstein, Julie. (2008). Cultural differences in perception: Observations from a remote culture. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 8 (3-4), 189-209.

Den Danske Ordbog. Copenhaguen: Gyldendal. http://ordnet.dk/ddo/ [accessed Oct 30, 2012]

Diewald, Gabriele, & Smirnova, Elena. (2010a). Evidentiality in German: Linguistic Realization and Regularities in Grammaticalization. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Diewald, Gabriele, & Smirnova, Elena. (Eds.). (2010b). Linguistic Realization of Evidentiality in European Languages. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Evans, Nicholas, & Wilkins, David P. (2000). In the Mind’s ear: The semantic extensions of perception verbs in Australian languages. Language, 76 (3), 546- 592.

Guerrero, Lilián. (2011). El amor no surge de los ojos sino de los oídos: Asociaciones semánticas en lenguas yuto-aztecas. ONOMÁZEIN, 21, 47-69.

Guignard, Jean-Baptiste. (2012). Les grammaires cognitives. Une épistémologie. Toulouse : Presses Universitaires du Mirail.

Hagège, Claude. (2012). Contre la pensée unique. Paris: Odile Jacob.

Ibarretxe-Antuñano, Iraide. (1999). Polysemy and Metaphor in Perception Verbs: A Cross-linguistic Study. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Edinburgh.

Ibarretxe-Antuñano, Iraide. (2008). Vision metaphors for the intellect: Are they really cross-linguistic? ATLANTIS, 30 (1), 15-33.

Ibarretxe-Antuñano, Iraide. (2003). El cómo y el porqué de la polisemia de los verbos de percepción. In Clara Molina, Marisa Blanco, Juana Marín et al. (Eds.), Cognitive Linguistics in Spain at the Turn of the Century (pp. 213-228). Asociación Española de Lingüística Cognitiva / Universidad Autónoma Madrid.

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Ibarretxe-Antuñano, Iraide. (2013). The power of the senses and the role of culture in metaphor and language. In Rosario Caballero & Javier E. Diaz Vera (Eds.), Sensuous Cognition. Exploration into Human Sentience: Imagination, (E) motion and Perception (pp. 109-134). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

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Kopińska, Marta. (2009). Język jako narzędzie interpretacji rzeczywistości – językowy obraz świata. Un mundo, muchas miradas, 2, 53-76.

Kress, Bruno. (1982). Isländische Grammatik. Leipzig: Verlag Enzyklopädie.

Lakoff, George. (1987). Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lakoff, George, & Johnson, Mark. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press.

Lakoff, George, & Johnson, Mark. (1999). Philosophy in the Flesh. The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books.

Lindskoog, John N., & Lindskoog, Carrie A. (1964). Vocabulario cayapa. México: SIL and Quito: Ministerio de Educación Pública.

Marín-Arrese, Juana. (Ed.). (2004). Perspectives on Evidentiality and Modality. Madrid: Universidad Complutense.

Maslova, Elena. (2004). A universal constraint on sensory lexicon, or when hear can mean ‘see’? In Aleksandr P. Volodin (Ed.), Tipologičeskie obosnovanija v grammatike: k 70-letiju professora Xrakovskogo V.S. (pp. 300-312). Moscow: Znak. [Also in e-version: http://anothersumma.net/Publications/Perception.pdf; accessed Nov 3, 2012]

Materinskaja, Elena. (2005). Semantics of body parts names; a contrastive approach. Paper read at 36th PLM. Poznań, Poland.

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Nichols, Shaun. (2004). Folk concepts and intuitions: from philosophy to cognitive science. TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences, 8 (11), 514-518.

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Peterson, Tyler, & Sauerland, Uli. (Eds.). (2010). Evidence from Evidentials. UBCWPL, Vol. 28.

Starmans, Christina, & Friedman, Ori. (2012).The folk conception of knowledge. Cognition, 124, 272-283.

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Chapter 23 Self-presentation of the speaking subject. Selected interviews with ex-chancellors of the Marie Curie- Skłodowska University in Lublin

Anna Niderla UMCS, Lublin, Poland

1. The concept of self-presentation

The concept of self-presentation used in the title of this chapter has been borrowed into colloquial language from social psychology. It is understood, with some degree of simplification, as a picture of oneself encoded in the message sent in an interaction to an individual or collective receiver (Stach, 1989, p. 85). Researchers of self-presentation1 believe that it is one of the most frequent of people’s behaviors and results from their natural need to establish and maintain interpersonal relations: people are, in short, social beings. Andrzej Szmajke treats self-presentational actions as natural instruments of social influence in interaction:

A natural consequence of social contacts is the mutual influence that the participants in interactions exert on each other. One of the instruments or measures of social impact are self-presentational actions, directed at controlling the image of the self, the image that emerges in other people’s minds during interaction. When we contact other people face to face or only symbolically – when “the others” are present merely in our mind – we usually modify our actions to present

1 Among well-known models of self-presentation there are: Erving Goffman’s (1959) sociological model with his famous “theater of life” metaphor, the ideas of social psychologists (especially American), such as Edward E. Jones and Thane S. Pittman (1982) (the notion of “strategic self presentation”), Barry R. Schlenker (1975) (“natural self presentation” as a process automatically activated in the process of interaction) and his students (e.g. Mark Leary, 1996). Among Polish researchers of self presentation, Elżbieta Stojanowska (1998) and Andrzej Szmajke (1999, 2001) deserve special recognition.

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to “the audience” the specific image of the . self In other words, in real and symbolic meetings with other people we perform actions that help us make an appropriate impression, although often we do so unconsciously. (Szmajke 1999: 9)2

Szmajke claims that every type of action can be treated as self-presentational action, including verbalization (descriptions of internal dispositions, plans, expectations, results of actions and their interpretations, interests, attitudes and views), non-verbalization (smile, posture, gesture, appearance), and behavior (demonstration of views, beliefs, attitudes, and skills) (Szmajke, 2001, p. 166). He further claims that the public character of interaction, defined as the presence of an audience who observe the actor’s behavior, undoubtedly facilitates self- presentational actions: “It is essential that with regard to the ‘public’ conditions of a situation, the individual needs to be convinced that some audience (an individual or a group) can connect his/her behavior with the person” (Szmajke, 2001, p. 147). The concept of self-presentation is connected with the concept of viewpoint, for the understanding of which I follow Jerzy Bartmiński:

[Viewpoint is] a subjective-cultural factor, decisive for the way an object is referred to, including its categorisation, the choice of the onomasiological basis for creating its name and the selection of features attributed to the object in specific utterances and entrenched in meaning. (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 77)

Viewpoint thus

… involves a mental aspect, prototypically connected with the human subject, who not only observes but also conceptualises (identifies, categorises and interprets) the object, in order to finally name it. (p. 107)

This broad attitude to the concept of viewpoint that connects it to an interpretation of phenomena by the speaking subject is basically a cognitive approach. Elżbieta Tabakowska comments on it in the following way:

In this approach [broad, colloquial, A.N.] viewpoint has become identical to worldview, and the role of an ordinary viewer (the subject who automatically records what he/she sees) has turned into the

2 All quotations and examples from Polish translated by A.N.

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role of a conscious observer who not only chooses the object of observation but also enriches the observation with commentary (e.g. with axiological assessment). In this sense perception becomes interpretation. Mutatis mutandis, this assumption is also accepted by cognitive linguists, who claim that ‘what enters consciousness is not a faithful replica of the stimulus, but an interpretation of it’ (Sakita, 2001, p. 377). (Tabakowska, 2004, p. 49)3

In this way, the notion of viewpoint discussed in this chapter on the basis of specific data is linked with the notion of the linguistic worldview.

2. The database

The present study derives from the oral history project “The people and the life of the Marie Curie-Skłodowska University (UMCS) in Lublin in accounts of its former chancellors,” carried out at the university’s Department of Polish Philology and initiated by Jerzy Bartmiński. Interviews with UMCS’s ex-chancellors were conducted between 2008 and 2010 during an M.A. seminar for students of journalism. Most of the interviews were recorded during the seminar but some were later continued as individual meetings between the students and the chancellors. Both the chancellors and the students were enthusiastic about the project. Seven ex-chancellors were interviewed: Prof. Zdzisław Cackowski, Prof. Kazimierz Goebel, Prof. Marian Harasimiuk, Prof. Wiesław Kamiński, Prof. Wiesław Skrzydło, Prof. Józef Szymański, and Prof. Stanisław Uziak. The interviews are stored as part of the oral history collection (Archive of Oral History, abbreviated AOH/UMCS), a section of the more comprehensive Ethnolinguistic Archive of the Department of Polish Philology, UMCS. The collected accounts can be called “stories of recollection,” concerning the university’s academic and scientific life, although in formal terms they fulfil the requirements of the genre of “conversation.”4 Their characteristic feature is a duality of the temporal plane: “now” (when I am speaking) and “then” (the time of the events being retold). In the archived collection, there are two types of

3 Tabakowska quotes Sakita, who in turn attributes the view to Wallace Chafe (1994). 4 I follow Żydek-Bednarczuk’s view of conversation, defined as “a communicative event in a face to face encounter, verbally realised, involving at least two participants anchored in socio-cultural and situational conditions. The participants choose the theme for their conversation and try to realize their specific intentions. Success of the communication depends on the interaction between the participants, cooperation between them, and the theme of the conversation” (Żydek-Bednarczuk, 1994, p. 32).

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recordings: semi-official conversations, in the presence of students, between Jerzy Bartmiński and the chancellors (equal partners, and co-workers), and individual interviews with the chancellors conducted by the students without a third party – the character of these meetings was rather private.5

3. The analysis

While analyzing the data, I refer to individual speakers anonymously and follow the chronological order in which they held the office of chancellor.6 The first of the cited chancellors, Chancellor A, held his office in the years 1972-1981. He was nominated for the office by the Minister of Education. He portrays the role of the chancellor in the following way:

(1) The university was our common good. It should be important for all of us that we sail on board this ship and that the captain has to command the ship wisely, and if he commands it wrongly, he must be replaced, and all of us have to perform our duties properly to help the ship reach the harbor. That’s how I see it. (AOH/UMCS, Tape 16557)

Chancellor A claims that the head of the university is like a ship captain, who commands, leads, has authority and makes decisions. The captain is also responsible for his crew. The speaker, one may guess, refers to himself. The passage contains many deontic modal verbs and plural forms of personal and possessive pronouns: the university was our common good, it should be important for all of us, we sail, all of us have to. This emphasizes the responsibility of the whole community: the university is a higher good that calls for collective effort, work, and sacrifice. Collective pronoun forms bring associations with the time of the People’s Republic of Poland8 and its distinctive idiom. In that period, homeland was viewed as the society’s “collective duty” that required a joint effort to develop and be economically strong and stable.

5 As is confirmed by psychological evidence, the presence of a third-party audience plays a crucial role in communication and acts of self-presentation. The same rule applies to the relationship between the host of a meeting and his/her interlocutors. The host (thanks to his status, his knowledge, or his lack thereof) can prompt or obstruct the self-presentational acts of the other participants (cf. the quote from Szmajke (1999, p. 9) above). 6 Not all recordings contain memories of the “speaker-as-chancellor”; therefore, the analysis here pertains to recollections of six out of the seven chancellors interviewed. A fuller version with an analysis of all the interviews will appear in Niderla (forthcoming). 7 The numbers here are those in the Ethnolinguistic Archive catalog. 8 I.e., 1952-1989.

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Chancellor B held his office in the years 1982-1984, which covered the period of Martial Law, a difficult chapter in Polish history.9 Importantly, Chancellor B was nominated by the Ministry of Education, although he was politically independent. He emphasizes problems that he had to face during his term in office:

(2a) It was an atmosphere [suspension of voice], in this atmosphere it was necessary to salvage the honor and dignity of the university, people’s dignity. In my report from that time, hidden deeply, I attack the Party, where the Party tries to take issue with me that it did everything right, etc., and only people were bad. Nobody looks into that report. It was not like that. Not like that. [cough] It wasn’t true and it was necessary to rescue dignity. Nobody wants to remember today that there were only three universities in Poland where nobody was fired: it was the university in Warsaw, whose chancellor was a “collaborator” too, it was the university in Cracow, whose chancellor was later labeled a “collaborator,” and it was UMCS. (AOH/UMCS TN 1614).

In the cited account, Chancellor B uses lofty-style words, evokes “high” values, such as honor, dignity (mentioned three times in this short excerpt) and juxtaposes them with lexis related to war and defense (I attack, to rescue, to take issue, collaborator). The speaker presents himself as someone who fought and rescued the dignity of the university and of its people. He uses the word collaborator twice and in presupposition he also uses it in relation to himself (it was the university in Warsaw, whose chancellor was a “collaborator” too) although he bears a grudge against the academic milieu for being, in his opinion, spitefully and wrongly judged as collaborator (cf. Nobody looks into that report, Nobody wants to remember today). The man accepted the chancellor’s office from the hands of a communist minister and argues nowadays that his motive was to rescue the university, its honor and dignity, the dignity of its people, in a very difficult time. Denial is expressed three times: It wasn’t true, It was not like that, Not like that – this makes the account dramatic and shows the speaker’s disagreement with cursory interpretations of past events.

9 Martial Law in Poland lasted from December 13, 1981 to July 22, 1983. Strict measures and regulations were introduced, several public organizations including the trade union Solidarity were delegalized, strikes and demonstrations were prohibited, several large factories were militarized, telephone connections were disrupted, personal liberties severely restricted, a curfew was imposed, and many opposition activists were detained. Authority was handed over to the Military Council for National Rescue, led by General Wojciech Jaruzelski (Chmaj, Sokół, and Wrona, 2005, p. 322). For English-language in- depth accounts, see e.g. Paczkowski & Byrne (2007) or Russell & Cohn (2012).

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However, Chancellor B also exposes his dislike and criticism of the intellectual level of the university’s faculty and shows his lack of respect for their achievements:

(2b) I think that the office did not do me any good because for example I had always thought that our biologists were world-class people, broad- minded and everything... (AOH/UMCS TN 1614)

(2c) Thus I always claimed that the Faculty of Chemistry was good to make shoe polish. [cough] They were angry because of that and rightly so because of waveguide optics, because of this and that… After all waveguide optics was pure coincidence… (AOH/UMCS TN 1614)

When he sums up his term in office, Chancellor B concludes:I think that the office did not do me any good. And elsewhere:

(2d) So I think it was too bad that I was a chancellor because then I found out the shallowness of this university and how much it needs investment and modernization. (AOH/UMCS TN 1614)

That final statement is unequivocally negative: one can sense in it a certain distaste, bitterness, and a sense of failure. It is a failure as a chancellor and as a human being, misunderstood (in his opinion) by the academic community. The next speaker, Chancellor C, was elected to the office by the university’s Senate for the years 1984-1987. He declares that as an independent chancellor, chosen by the community, he was aware of the problems he would have to face dealing with the country’s authorities. He knew he could not count on any support in his endeavor to make the university develop. The chancellor’s role, he thought, was different: it was important to maintain the stability and the political independence of the university, as much as this was possible at the time.

(3a) I couldn’t and I didn’t count on any investments! But this wasn’t my major goal. My priorities were completely different: to hold regular classes, to help the faculty work normally, to let them work in peace, without fear that, well, that they might be dismissed suddenly for some reason; this was my major goal. And one more thing: to become a little independent from the “mother-Party,” as one of the party comrades said. (AOH/UMCS TN 1582)

(3b) …the point was to make the university work normally, to make people feel safe – it was my fundamental, let me say, my primary role and my task… (AOH/UMCS TN 1656)

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(3c) So I had a bit of help here… but also problems, as I said, because they wanted to fire some people, but in general I managed to maintain political independence from the authorities, you know. (AOH/UMCS TN 1656)

The structure of the excerpts above is based on such key words as normally, safe, without fear, work, fire, independence/independent (from the authorities/ mother-Party). Chancellor C emphasizes his role as a defender of normality, the security of academic life and its uninterrupted work. He reassures the listeners that he strove with great determination for the political independence of the university. It is known from other sources10 that his declaration is true. Chancellor C did not agree to the (socialist) Party’s directives, and this move had grave consequences, e.g. many of the chancellor’s initiatives, also investment initiatives, were blocked by the authorities. Nevertheless, the chancellor’s account expresses satisfaction with a fulfilment of his duty during a peculiar time of political pressure. The speaker also alludes to the axiological dimension of his work: in his opinion, the chancellor’s role was to protect, secure peace and a safe workplace for the employees. In his own eyes, he coped with the task well. In accounts of the chancellors who held the office later, in democratic times, entirely different issues are stressed. For example, for Chancellor D (1993-1999), the material and economic aspects of university life come to the fore:

(4a) I suppose my biggest success was a high number of investments. […] In that period I managed to obtain funds for a modernization of the university and I think that over the six years there was occasionally a minor budget deficit but generally it worked out. (AOH/UMCS TN 1627)

The chancellor concentrates on investments and economic matters (my biggest success, investments, obtain funds; deficit) and the narrator shows himself as an investor in a company, i.e. the university. In his view, modernization and enlargement of the “company’s” capital are the measure of success achieved by its manager (my biggest success; I managed). Chancellor D’s assessment of his performance qua chancellor is also marked by self-satisfaction:

(4b) I do not consider that time as a lost time; it was an adventure, it was my great adventure! (AOH/UMCS TN 1684)

10 Jerzy Bartmiński (p.c.).

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(4c) I think that the time when I was the chancellor was one of the coolest periods in my life and I had great fun… Sometimes I say impertinently, I had an amazing time with the university; I mean it: it was an adventure, I treated it as a great, six-year-long adventure. (AOH/UMCS TN 1684)

Chancellor D talks about being a chancellor as a period in his life that was light and enjoyable: his individual, great, amazing adventure, when he could test himself, his abilities and skills. His account reveals the individualism, personal ambitions, and self-confidence of a man satisfied with his achievements. The interview shows signs of egocentrism and undisguised satisfaction. One can even surmise that Chancellor D “creates himself” as a person of success or an “academic celebrity.” In the opinion of the next speaker, Chancellor E (1999-2005), the management of the university has a somewhat different character: it requires a broad perspective and a penetrating insight into university life:

(5a) I still maintain that the chancellor should be an enlightened ruler, which means seeing absolutely everything! […] Here I suppose this enlightenment is a matter of a very broad perspective, the chancellor mustn’t walk with his blinkers on and only see what’s right in front of him; the chancellor must see, he must have a vision, he must see a long way in front of him. (AOH/UMCS TN 1629)

Chancellor E claims that the head of university’s far-reaching and creative purview should embrace the whole university, not only the units or departments closest to him or her. Moreover, in his opinion the chancellor should be a visionary with specific ideas about the university and with plans for their implementation. The speaker uses a number of modal verbs (should, must x 3, mustn’t) that stress the obligatory character of what is required of a chancellor. Interestingly, the same speaker constructs another model that underscores different aspects of his work:

(5b) If I were to say a couple of words about my own personal experience, I walked just along that path because altogether I served in the university administration for eighteen years: I was a vice-dean for three years, then I was a dean for three years, later a vice-chancellor for six years and the chancellor for another six years – altogether that’s eighteen years of continuous work. It was a path from the level of vice- dean, at the basic level of university structure, the faculty. One can say I was doing an apprenticeship that helped me become familiar with the university and I can immodestly say that when I was taking up the position of chancellor I thought I knew the university. But then I realized

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I must learn the university all over again because it is an entirely different perspective when you look at it from the position of a dean, vice-chancellor and finally from position of a person with full, one- hundred-percent, one-man responsibility for everything that happens at the university. This is the chancellor’s situation, he has thousands of people under him, in our case it’s 1800 academics and as many in other areas but the responsibility falls to one person. It is important to remember that there’s a problem of trust, a certain confidence in the team that the chancellor has at his disposal, in the people, and, in my opinion, this is an essential condition of the good management of a university. A good team and confidence in people, the belief that the people you entrust with duties will fulfil them in good faith and to the best of their ability. And I think that it functioned this way. (AOH/UMCS TN 1629)

In this excerpt, Chancellor E says that the office of the university head is preceded by a long path to the top in the course of which you become familiar with the university but you must learn it all over again when the office is assumed. In his view, being a chancellor is a service with huge responsibility with two very important aspects: cooperation with people and confidence in them. In his own assessment, he managed to build this tripartite model: service – cooperation – trust. In this way, the chancellor could effectively manage the large community that the university is. The last speaker, Chancellor F (2005-2008), when asked about his motives to accept the office, said:

(6) There were some motives, when we talk about personal motives there was, maybe modest or maybe immodest, an assessment of my experience, because as I mentioned I had been for a long time in the community, inside this academic community, so at first the experience of almost thirty years of being within this community on the one hand, and on the other hand the experience I gained in academic institutions abroad… I wanted to make use of it for our community’s sake because I believed that there are a couple of matters that are worth doing here, taking advantage of my experience for the sake of our environment, and it was a part of my program that I formulated then. […] As for running for chancellor, in fact there were two reasons: on the one hand there were matters connected with the functioning of our academic community, let me say, with its functioning in the economic sense, and also with the structure of the community’s management. There were some, let me say, past coincidences that caused financial problems we then had to cope with as a community. The goals that our university

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had always had was the desire to make this academic community a true community, aspiring to be one of the best universities in Poland, with appropriate scholarly impact, an appropriate educational offer, and not only that but in fact a realization of this offer – and this is one group of demands, that is, to implement some changes in the functioning of the university and to secure the financial conditions to realize this mission. Speaker 2: I understand that you judged them as not good enough? Chancellor F: Correct. Anyway, there was a formal basis for the judgment, that is, there was simply not enough money to introduce many of these programs that would raise the quality of teaching and research. Sometimes we painfully felt the lack of finances, the university had to take external loans and, you know, with a financial millstone round one’s neck our big plans collided with reality, and in a natural way they had to be trimmed down. (AOH/UMCS TN 1635)

In this excerpt, we receive a picture of a chancellor who took his office with high aspirations and big expectations of himself and the academic milieu, someone who would not settle for second best. The speaker uses expressions that indicate his competence and professionalism, as well as the high standards he sets for himself: my experience, the experience I gained, taking advantage of my experience for the sake of our environment, my program, appropriate educational offer, appropriate scholarly impact, to implement some changes in the functioning of the university, to secure the financial conditions, to realize this mission, to raise the quality of teaching and research. The speaker declares himself to have had a vision of the university, its reform and development, by raising the quality of teaching, studying and research. In the excerpt there is a distinct personal, first- person viewpoint of the narrator. The viewpoint is realized through personal and possessive pronouns: my experience, my program, or (in another part of the interview) the problem I had when I took the office, my observation, the pain I felt when I was about to begin my service as chancellor, I observed, I remember, etc. The high frequency of these forms is the hallmark of what might even be described as a narcissistic attitude of the speaker, almost totally preoccupied with himself. On the other hand, Chancellor F emphasizes the role of the community. In the excerpt he uses the word wspólnota ‘community’ nine times on its own and the collocation wspólnota akademicka ‘academic community’ three times.11 It is a specific community (this community), located here in Lublin.

11 The numbers pertain to the Polish original, in the English translation they might be somewhat different.

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The speaker refers to other places as academic institutions, but when he talks about his own institution, he says academic community (this community, our community), our environment, our university. Characteristic of this speaker is a high frequency of the inclusive possessive pronoun our (our community, our big plans), which emphasizes his emotional bond with the academic community. Chancellor F portrays himself as a reformer who, unfortunately, did not achieve the success he had planned. In the last sentences of the cited fragment, he attributes the unrealized plans to the difficult financial condition of the university: with a financial millstone round one’s neck our big plans collided with reality, and in a natural way they had to be trimmed down.

4. Conclusions

From the analyzed material emerge individual visions of what kind of figure the chancellor of UMCS can be. The visions are largely connected with and determined by the socio-historical conditions in Poland in different periods. The chancellors who held the office in the People’s Republic of Poland emphasized the axiological dimensions of their work and highlighted such values as dignity, honor, security, or the political independence of the university. For the younger chancellors, whose terms fell during the time of democratic Poland (after 1989), the most essential factor was the economic situation of the university, the level of research and teaching, modernization of the university and a development of its infrastructure. Thus, several self-presentational models of the chancellor can be identified. Some of the labels for these models are expressions actually used by the interviewees, others are my inventions:

Model 1. SHIP CAPTAIN (Chancellor A). In this model the chancellor heads and commands a ship. He expects from his subordinates conscientious work for the university as “common good.”

Model 2. RESCUER AND DEFENDER OF DIGNITY versus COLLABORATOR. (Chancellor B). The most contrastive model, permeated with a sense of the narrator’s total personal failure. The chancellor shows himself as a man who fought for the good name of the university but was unjustly judged as an ally of the political authorities.

Model 3. GUARD OF UNIVERSITY’S POLITICAL INDEPENDENCE (Chancellor C). The chancellor’s goal is clearly specified: to maintain the political independence of the university even at the cost of big sacrifices (e.g. lack of investments).

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Model 4. INVESTOR/ACADEMIC CELEBRITY (Chancellor D). In this model the chancellor plays the role of the main businessman at the university. His major task is to take good care of the university’s business with an emphasis on the development of its infrastructure. Characteristic of the chancellor is preoccupation with himself, being content and satisfied with his achievements on many planes of his activity.

Model 5. AN ENLIGHTENED RULER (Chancellor E). This model portrays the chancellor as a ruler with a broad perspective and penetrating insight. He is willing to put his trust in his co-operators despite his one-man responsibility for the whole university.

Model 6. MEMBER OF COMMUNITY/UNFULFILLED MANAGER (Chancellor F). The model is characterized by ambition and activism, a desire to implement large-scale changes and innovations. The chancellor’s partial failure in these endeavors makes his satisfaction incomplete.

As one can observe, each of the chancellors describes his work by formulating (directly or indirectly) a model of the chancellor’s office that stems from his aspirations and personal experience. Certainly, none of the models in isolation is equivalent to the overall comprehensive picture of the office of university chancellor; rather, each highlights some of its aspects and downplays others. With some approximation to and extension of Langacker’s (1987, pp. 162ff.; 2008, pp. 215ff.) network model, each may be understood as an “access node” to a broader and more extensive network of relationships, duties, tasks, demands, etc. that a chancellor must face. Each is a “micro-network” that covers only a portion of the whole picture, which, in turn, can always admit new extensions, elaborations, and interpretations of its structure from a potentially infinite number of speaking subjects. In the present analysis I only concentrate on the most conspicuous models, the most clearly expressed by each speaker, and refer the reader to Niderla (forthcoming) for the complete version. In some cases one narrator constructs two models of the chancellor; however, none of the models appears to have been constructed by more than one speaker. In all interviews one can identify certain self-presentational techniques, such as showing oneself in the most advantageous light, downplaying one’s shortcomings and mistakes, emphasizing one’s assets, positive personality traits, and achievements. Were these techniques effective, however, in obtaining the favor of the audience? Judging from the behavior of the students who participated in the meetings with former chancellors, they indeed were. The students constitute a peculiar audience, inexperienced and in some measure naive. Their young age, unfamiliarity with the details of university life, or with broader sociological

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and political conditions, in a natural manner render them susceptible to self- presentational techniques and limit their ability to verify the picture thus obtained. It is especially noticeable in comparing the data obtained during seminar meetings, run by Professor Jerzy Bartmiński,12 with the data from individual conversations between the students and the ex-chancellors. During the seminar meetings the chancellors tried to avoid difficult and debatable questions, they restrained themselves in talk, avoided direct assessment of themselves. It may have been caused by the awareness that their interlocutor knows them well and can easily notice inaccuracies in their reports or question the information they provide. In contrast, during individual interviews with students, the ex-chancellors did not refrain from praising themselves or conveying self-promotional messages. The structure of the interviews in the two contexts was also different. When the host of the event was an equal conversational partner, the conversation was subject to thematic discipline controlled by the moderator. In individual interviews with students, the chancellors were much more relaxed and expansive. However, this is a broader issue, worthy of a separate study.

12 Professor Bartmiński was a vice-chancellor of UMCS in the years 1991-1993 and maintains personal relationships with all of the ex-chancellors.

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References

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (2009/2102). Aspects of Cognitive Ethnolinguistics. Ed. Jörg Zinken. Sheffield and Oakville, CT: Equinox.

Chafe, Wallace L. (1994). Discourse, Consciousness, and Time. The Flow and Displacement of Conscious Experience in Speaking and Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Chmaj, Marek, Sokół, Wojciech, & Wrona, Janusz. (2005). Historia. Repetytorium dla kandydatów na studia prawnicze, administracyjne, politologiczne, historyczne i socjologiczne. Bydgoszcz-Warszawa-Lublin: Oficyna Wydawnicza BRANTA.

Goffman, Erving. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Edinburgh: The University of Edinburgh Social Sciences Research Centre. Anchor Books Edition.

Jones, Edward E., & Pittman, Thane S. (1982). Toward a general theory of strategic self presentation. In Jerry Suls (Ed.), Psychological Perspectives on the Self. Vol. 1 (pp. 231-262). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Langacker, Ronald W. (1987). Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Vol. 1. Theoretical Prerequisites. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

Langacker, Ronald W. (2008). Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Leary, Mark. (1996). Self Presentation: Impression Management and Interpersonal Behavior. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Niderla, Anna. (forthcoming). Self-presentation of the Speaking Subject in Oral History. The Case of Former Chancellors of Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, Poland. Doctoral dissertation. UMCS, Lublin, Poland.

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Paczkowski, Andrzej, & Byrne, Malcolm. (2007). From Solidarity to Martial Law. The Polish Crisis of 1980-1981: A Documentary History. Budapest and New York: Central European University Press.

Russell, Jesse, & Cohn, Ronald. (2012). Martial Law in Poland. Bookvika Publishing/Book on Demand Ltd.

Sakita, Tomoko I. (2001). Cognition in reporting discourse: Mental representation and speaker perspectives. In Eniko T. Nemth (Ed.), Cognition in Language Use. Selected Papers from the 7th International Pragmatics Conference (pp. 375-387). Antwerp: IPrA.

Schlenker, Barry R. (1975). Self-presentation: Managing the impression of consistency when reality interferes with self-enhancement. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32, 1030-1037.

Stach, Ryszard. (1989). Autoprezentacja jako komunikat interpersonalny. In Zbigniew Nęcki (Ed.), Z zagadnień komunikowania interpersonalnego: materiały z I Ogólnopolskiej konferencji „Komunikowanie interpersonalne” (pp. 85-92). Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego.

Stojanowska, Elżbieta. (1998). Opisywanie siebie w warunkach autoprezentacji oraz prywatnie: style autoprezentacji. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Wyższej Szkoły Pedagogiki Specjalnej im. Marii Grzegorzewskiej.

Szmajke, Andrzej. (1999). Autoprezentacja. Maski, pozy, miny. Olsztyn: Ursa Consulting.

Szmajke, Andrzej. (2001). Autoprezentacja – niewinny spektakl dla innych i siebie. In Mirosław Kofta & Teresa Szustrowa (Eds.), Złudzenia, które pozwalają żyć. Szkice ze społecznej psychologii osobowości (pp. 146-175). Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN.

Tabakowska, Elżbieta. (2004). O językowych wyznacznikach punktu widzenia. In Jerzy Bartmiński, Stanisława Niebrzegowska-Bartmińska, & Ryszard Nycz (Eds.), Punkt widzenia w języku i w kulturze (pp. 47-64). Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Żydek-Bednarczuk, Urszula. (1994). Struktura tekstu rozmowy potocznej. Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego.

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Chapter 24 Linguistic views of enslavement in biographical narratives of Poles in Kazakhstan

Wiktoria Kudela-Świątek Polish Oral History Association, Kraków, Poland

1. Preliminary remarks

According to Leszek Kołakowski (2004), freedom can only exist where some things are permitted and others forbidden. Freedom of choice can be discussed in the context of democratic societies, while in totalitarian societies even permitted things are forbidden. In this situation, the difference between freedom and its absence gradually fades; as a result, people often try to adjust themselves to the context and, as much as possible, live their lives to the fullest. When planning, years ago, field research among the Polish community in Kazakhstan, I knew that my prospective interlocutors, being a minority, had been neglected in the social life of the Soviet Union, publicly humiliated due to their nationality and religion, and forced to consent to a life in conditions imposed on them. The biographical stories I collected, however, make one reflect more deeply on the position of an individual in Soviet society and its consequence to my informants’ construal of their situation, namely a profound conviction of being deprived of freedom. It is mainly manifested in the fact that none of the narratives include words or expressions equivalent to “enslavement,” “loss of freedom,” etc. Does that mean that the Great Terror had never taken place? On the contrary, it shows how disastrous its consequences were to people’s mentality.

2. The Oral Sources Used and the Methodological Context

My research concerns the Polish diaspora in Kazakhstan, mainly descendants of the victims of Stalin’s 1930s mass-deportation from the border regions of pre-WWII Soviet Ukraine. During that decade, around 250,000 Poles from the

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Ukrainian SSR were deported to the Kazakh SSR. Many of these Poles were placed in isolation far from each other to prevent contact. They were placed on the desolate outpost of labor colonies in Northern Kazakhstan with no food or shelter, forced to survive on their own. Despite the help received from ethnic Kazakhs, thousands died of starvation, sickness, and exposure during the first few years. In 1956, Nikita Khrushchev decided to grant freedom to the deportees, who could then choose their place of residence for the first time. Many Kazakhstani Poles moved to the cities to start professions in business and education. Others, however, stayed and worked on farms. Thanks to their organizational skills and work ethic, many Kazakhstani Poles were soon leaders of industry, government, and educational institutions in the Soviet Union. Thus, some of them were a part of the Soviet society and tried to adapt to the communist system. Therefore, their attempts to preserve their national identity are especially interesting. Nowadays 40,000 Poles live in Kazakhstan. Half of them (18,700) live in the Karaganda region, with another 2,500 in Astana, 1,200 in Almaty, and the rest scattered throughout rural regions (Poujol, 2007, p. 91). Kazakhstani Poles are one of the country’s communities with their own experience of everyday life in the Soviet regime. Their life stories reveal diverse details that together constitute a collective memory of the regime. The data collected for my research consist of fifty-one interviews conducted in the North Kazakhstan and Akmola provinces between July and August 2009. The interviews were recorded in the following localities: Ozernoye, Stepnoye, Pietropavlovsk, Tayinsha, Chkalovo, Krasnokiyevka, Novoberezovka, Podolskoye, Kellerovka, Dragomirovka, Donietskoye, Litovochnoye, and Shchuchinsk.1 The research was carried out within the contemporary framework of oral history. This method allows the researcher to grasp key elements of the reports, individual ways of reasoning, features characteristic of the linguistic worldview of the narrators as well as personal interpretation by the narrator of his or her experience of the past (see Schütze, 1990, 1997; Riemann & Schütze, 1992).2 The narratives are interpretations of past experience and seem to be structured according to individual conventions. The question I address in my research is how individuals, societies, and cultures use texts to represent the past. I apply the study of language to the concerns of oral history and demonstrate the usefulness of interviews for discourse analysis. In this context, it is important to consider the originality of the language of Kazakhstani Poles

1 A copy of my collection has been handed over to the Oral History Archive of the KARTA Center in Warsaw and will soon be published on the Center’s website: www.audiohistoria.pl. 2 For the question of multiplicity of research perspectives in modern oral history, see Kudela-Świątek (2011).

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– a mixture of Ukrainian, Russian, and Polish – and the expression of their past experience through biographical narration. In focus are the linguistic exponents of the interviewees’ traumatic narratives of national identity, childhood, work on Soviet collective farms and everyday life in a totalitarian society. In these biographical stories told by Kazakhstani Poles, I was not looking for confirmation of already well-known historical facts; rather, my aim was to reconstruct my narrators’ views of enslavement. This is sought in the application of the concept of linguistic worldview, which allows one to grasp, through analysis of linguistic data, the way persons or whole communities perceive, categorize, and mentally organize the world (cf. Kopińska, 2009). Investigation of the linguistic worldview of my interviewees provides access to their construal of the past. The notion of the linguistic worldview that I follow is that proposed by Jerzy Bartmiński, who defines it as “the interpretation of reality encoded in a given language, which can be captured in the form of judgements about the world. The judgements can be either entrenched in the language, its grammatical forms, lexicon and ‘frozen’ texts (e.g. proverbs) or implied by them” (2009/2012, p. 76). The linguistic worldview is a common interpretation of reality from the point of view of average language users, which reflects their mentality and complies to their needs and aspirations (2009/2012, p. 24; cf. also Bartmiński, 2006a, pp. 12-16). Analysis of the linguistic view of enslavement in the narratives of Poles from Kazakhstan reveals the point of view of the narrators, their emotional attitude towards the events they describe, as well as their judgments of the attitudes of the people they mention in their stories. Understanding these concepts is not, however, possible without explaining the socio-cultural context in which the narratives are grounded. It is therefore important to emphasize the issue of bilingualism and its types among my narrators, along with their level of education and their social position.

3. The languages of the narratives

According to Julia Kristeva (1984, pp. 47-48), language is a symbolic interpretation of social convention; it reflects the laws and rules of how the convention functions. In the context of the present study, the language used by the narrator is a tool for constructing an image of the past, for positioning oneself in a specific socio-cultural environment, and for presenting the narrator’s attitude towards the events being described (Lenkiewicz, 2005, p. 193). Among my narrators there were speakers of Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, the diaspora variety of Polish, as well as bilingual persons. The last category deserves closer attention since the resources of more than one language allow a speaker to create richer descriptions of the historical context. However, the

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language of the vast majority of narratives is Russian; it is also present in the remaining narratives as a supportive element, in the form of Russian influences on vocabulary and grammar. The issue of “Russian speakerness” of my narrators is also an important one. Russian now has an official status in Kazakhstan as the language of mutual communication between the various ethnicities that inhabit the country (Аренов and Калмыков, 1995) – Kazakhstani society has been multinational from the very beginning of its existence. The enormous differences among Kazakhstani citizens were “reconciled” in the same way as in the rest of the Soviet Union: by imposing Russian culture, understood by ideologists as a “new native culture” (Макеев, 1999, p. 63). As a result of an internationalist social policy, a new type of linguistically-defined social group emerged, called “Russian speakers”: these are people who use Russian for everyday communication but who do not always identify themselves with the Russian Federation as a country or with its citizens (Макеев, 1999, p. 67).3 Russian linguists do not regard Russian-speaking communities in post-Soviet countries as belonging to the “Russian language community” because the variety of Russian they speak is vulgarized. It is the result of a long-term process of vulgarization in the period when it was the language of communication between nations inside the Soviet Union (Landau & Kellner-Heinkele, 2001, pp. 139-141, 159-162, 178-184). In the former Union republics it has for now been preserved in a ”mummified” form and is in this form passed on further, both in everyday communication and through school education. It is not, therefore, the Russian language of Lev Tolstoy or Alexander Pushkin, but a relic of the Soviet reality. The differences are visible at the level of phonetics, vocabulary, and style of the narrations. At present in northern Kazakhstan, there are a few localities whose inhabitants have managed to preserve their own language, such as Ozernoye, Podolskoye, Khrechany or Beloyarka, mainly in the sacral and ritual sphere, but also in domestic use. Among the inhabitants of these villages, the vast majority are Poles. In Ozernoye, the conditions for preserving their language were more favourable: half of the families in this locality use the south-eastern dialect of Polish spoken in the rest of the territory of Kazakhstan (Werenicz, 2010, pp. 270, 276). Bilingualism can only be found in villages: in the cities, the language of the Polish diaspora has been ousted by Russian and Ukrainian due to social pressure and general policy as well as a higher proportion of intermarriage (Werenicz, 2010, p. 275). Even in rural monoethnic communities, however, the

3 Incidentally, an additional factor now integrating this heterogeneous group is their confrontation with a national and religious revival of Kazakhs (Макеев, 1999, p. 66).

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language of Kazakhstani Poles has been preserved only in spoken, not in written form. Among scholars, the prevailing opinion is that the future of Polish in Kazakhstan is probably doomed because the younger generation and those who have moved to cities usually become full-fledged Russian speakers Ананьева( , 1990, p. 203). The majority of those of my narrators who speak the language of the Kazakhstani Polish diaspora are in fact bilingual: they use Russian for everyday communication and the local dialect of Polish for contacts with the representatives of their own group (cf. Werenicz, 2010, p. 265). Bilingualism has in this case a post-colonial aspect. It has been found that the language of the Kazakhstani Polish community is characterized by extensive mutual interferences and deformations between Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish. In many cases, especially in plays on words or folk proverbs, metaphors have been automatically calqued from Russian (Peyrouse, 2008, p. 107). The result is to a large degree a hybrid, but it is precisely through that language that its speakers define not only the world surrounding them but also their past experiences. Their bilingualism is a linguistic but also a socio-psychological phenomenon: it reveals the complex nature of the group’s identity. However, because their narrations have often met with a certain degree of insensitivity, Kazakhstani Poles tend to feel alienated both in Kazakhstan and in Poland. In both countries they face serious adaptation issues related to the language barrier and therefore also a psychological barrier. The problem is aggravated by insensitivity to viewpoint differences between the Poles in diaspora speaking Russian, Ukrainian, or their own variety of Polish on the one hand, and the Poles in Poland on the other hand, especially so because the latter group treat citizenship and national identity as synonymous and do not experience problems with linguistic competence. Importantly, notions such as “enslavement” have a different meaning for the Poles in Poland than for those in Kazakhstan, separated from their historical fatherland. Their respective viewpoints have been shaped in different socio-semantic spheres and historical circumstances. My narrators often use words for such notions as “homeland” (Bartmiński, 2006b) or “freedom” in the sense imposed by the Soviet ideology, rather than in their general understanding. However, in the literature on the subject these words are often translated directly, which contributes to the non- realistic image of the Polish minority in former USSR countries (Kudela-Świątek, 2010). These reasons, as well as an excessive use of the term “Poles in the East” in public discourse, make it difficult to realize that in fact there is no such group. The Poles in Kazakhstan, Russia, or Ukraine are autonomous groups, using different varieties of Russian, Ukrainian, or Polish. In spite of the common experience of repressions under the Soviet rule, they understand the idea of “enslavement” in different ways, as the result of their individual experiences of the past. My focus is on the understanding of this idea by Kazakhstani Poles.

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Because the vast majority of my interviewees come from a rural background and still live in post-kolkhoz settlements, the emotionality of their reports is evident. Linguistic studies of rural communities show that in the rural vision of the world everything must be not only named, but also interpreted and subjected to social judgement, with very strong pressure from the society (Pelcowa, 1999, p. 258). The linguistic rural world is shaped according to its own needs, adjusted to a life in harmony with nature and religion (p. 259). There is on the one hand a visible tendency to simplify the world by giving everything a new name, but on the other – also to enrich and expand it through the richness of vocabulary, word coinage, or the use of local names. My narrators felt, therefore, a need to create their own names for the enslavement they had experienced. In this way, the narrator aims to present to the listener not only a point of view, but also their emotional attitude toward the events being described.

4. Key words

To achieve this goal, the narrator can adjust words, through various semantic transformations, to fit his or her individual needs, to accurately reflect the feelings and emotions experienced in the times of enslavement. I suggest that the following words were used by the narrators in this way: “oppression” (Russ. угнетение),4 “coercion” (Russ. гнет, Ukr. притискати),5 “persecution” (Russ. приследование),6 “bullying” (Russ. издевательство).7 They can be captured under the rubric of a “lack of freedom” since they show the importance of the spatial component in the Russian understanding of freedom (Wierzbicka, 1997, pp. 138ff). The repressions experienced by Poles in Kazakhstan, especially the inability to move outside the borders of the kolkhoz settlement and the obligatory residence registration, indicate the dependent social position of my interviewees, portrayed in their narratives through images referring to physical restraint by an unknown external force that is referred to with the 3rd person plural form (the unspecified “they”). The oppressor is therefore not an individual, the leader of the country, but an abstract evil, with features attributed in Russian folklore to diabolical powers. It makes it easier for the listener to understand how the narrators conceive of the common stem гнет. The Russian noun угнетение is translated into English as oppression and means

4 Interview with Nina (Jadwiga), Aug 7, 2009, Kellerovka, 7:44-10:13. 5 Interview with Vitaliya P., Aug 9, 2009, Kellerovka, 21:41-24:00. 6 Interview with Maria L., Aug 7, 2009, Kellerovka, 33:40-34:00. 7 Interview with Galina Z., July 29, 2009, Petropavlovsk, 10:00.

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a state in which an individual feels totally dominated and abused by another person, group of people, or an external causative force (Ожегов and Шведова, 1990, p. 822). It indirectly refers to the concept of “slavery,” as in the phrase угнетать рабов ‘to oppress the slaves’ (Мокиенко & Никитина, 1998, p. 124). Consider example (1) (emphasis WKŚ):

(1) [Wiktoria Kudela-Świątek:] Have you ever considered your nationality an obstacle? [Interviewee:] Me? I have, especially in childhood. We lived in such a sovkhoz! [...] My patronymic is Nina Cezarievna. [My father’s name was] Cezary – right? They were laughing, called a dog like that. Well, we were somehow oppressed. Even my name they had to change. Bullying. (interview with Nina (Jadwiga), Aug 7, 2009, Kellerovka, 7:44-10:13)

This speaker treats enslavement as a lack of possibility to decide about herself, as constant control from an abstract oppressing force that uses fear as a tool for organising the socio-political life in the country, as being stripped of human dignity, as instrumental treatment of individuals and groups (such as Poles in the Soviet Union), and as complete resignation to their slavish situation. Cf. also example (2):

(2) [WKŚ:] When did your First Holy Communion take place? [I:] I had my First Holy Communion in the year 1955. No, 1956. I remember that because Father Kuczyński was with us. He’s gone now, passed away, died a long time ago. He was also judged here, a nephew reported on him… [WKŚ:] (surprised) [I:] Yes – he... people were coming to him… books, booklets for the church and he was selling them, what else. The church had to be maintained, and what about him? Soviet books, the thick ones were for twenty – thirty kopieykas and he would take more. So he was “branded” as a speculator and locked up for ten years. And when they wanted to get rid of him, they would induce taxes. [...] They induced eighty thousand in taxes – the people collected it. And at that time thousands was more money, not like nowadays. All the people collected the money and paid it. And on the days that followed they said ninety thousand, such was the bullying... (interview with Galina V., Aug 3, 2009, Novoberezovka, 34:36-36:28)

It is puzzling that the word for “repression” was not used in any of the narratives, while the phrase for “we were not free,” to which I return below, did appear. To explain the situation in the country at the time, the narrators used words for such concepts as “discipline” (examples (3) and (5)), “orders” (Russ. порядки) (example (4)), and “severity” (Russ. строгость) (example (5)):

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(3) [I:] ... there were loans. They would come to you – sign up for a “loan.” And what else can you sign for. They weren’t paying the salaries, the tax was high. For a cow… from the farmer they required ninety eggs. Whether you have the hens or not, you must give away ninety eggs. Thirty six kilograms of meat, and the man would not have even seen that meat (laughing), so where should he get it from, and that’s the way they were… they were [treating] us… just like we were nothing; there was hard discipline towards us, very hard discipline we had until the death of Stalin, and after Stalin’s death it was better. And when the times of Gorbachev came, then freedom started. Then everybody could say what they wanted, do what they wanted. That would be all… (interview with Galina V., Aug 3, 2009, Novoberezovka, 46:46-49:06)

In this example, one can see a change in the semantics of the word for “discipline” under the influence of Soviet ideology: this person uses it in the sense of strict obedience of every citizen to the rules of behaviour established by public legislation and to the orders and commands of his or her superiors (Мокиенко & Никитина, 1998, pp. 166-167). Similarly with the notion of “social order”: order is maintained through a system of punishments and rewards for, respectively, breaching or enhancing the discipline. In its broad meaning the Russian word for “order” is defined as a harmonious and predictable distribution of things. When used in the plural, however, it means social order, where public law is obeyed unconditionally (Ожегов & Шведова, 1990, p. 565). See example (4):

(4) [I:] ... and the commander was commuting. He lived in the district city. He would commute, wouldn’t sit in a Russian hamlet, he would commute [WKŚ:] would only commute to you [I:] He would commute, yes. There were Germans also, a few German families, and also my friend, also a Pole, in another village forty kilometres away. We had been studying together and we both ended up there. Well yes, honey, that was the orders we lived in… (interview with Galina S., Aug 7, 2009, Kellerovka, 51:43-54:18)

The term for “severity” is used to clarify the nature of that order. It is therefore interpreted as strict, meticulous obedience to the rules and connotes severe punishment for breaking them (example (5)):

(5) [I:] I have told you what I knew; what was all of it like and what was this Soviet power like, how they were throwing us away [...] and there was severity… such severity, what severity it was! One would be afraid to say anything honestly to another. And if he did, that would be the end of it! He’d make up a report and that’s the end of it, would write it down and all’s over! That’s how it was,

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that’s how it was [...] such a terrible discipline there was… (interview with Anna B., July 27, 2009, Ozernoye, 106:18-107:26)

The instrumental treatment of an individual in the totalitarian society is emphasised by the use of Russian verbs вытрясли ‘they shook [us] out,’ выгрузили ‘they unloaded [us from the train],’ высыпали ‘they poured [us] out [in the steppe],’ when reference is made to the very act of deportation. The obligation of complete obedience and acceptance of the prevalent ideology, including a public manifestation of the acceptance, required recanting their individuality and point of view. The result is a fatalistic attitude towards one’s own life. All expressions used by the narrators are united by the overriding idea of an enslaving social order, which totally subjects citizens to the absolute power of the state in every aspect of life. In this way, the speakers underscore the totalitarian (military) character of the Soviet rule – indirectly, through the description of their own feelings as individuals and citizens of the Soviet Union. Enslavement is understood by the narrators as a permanent state that involves every aspect of an individual’s life as part of the Soviet society.

5. Enslavement as “the lack of freedom”

A characteristic quality of the interviews I conducted was their traumatic character, identifiable through the performance of the narrators. Because they are reliving their traumatic experiences, a narrator may reveal negative emotions in a sudden and uncontrolled manner. They may cry, shout, weep, stop speaking, or leave the room, thus breaking the conversation. The latter reaction occurs when the narrator is anxious that his or her emotional state will not be understood and so prefers to remain silent rather than revealing him- or herself in front of a stranger. This is usually a turning point in the interview, after which the narrator asks for the conversation to end or through his or her behavior forces the researcher to do so. At such moments, my interviewees tended to use single sentences, without contributing much to what has already been said. Welzer, Moller, & Tschuggnall (2009, pp. 380-381) describe them as “singular recurring sentences”, which in my data can be exemplified with “it was hard,”8 “living was hard,”9 “I don’t remember anything good – there was nothing good,”10 etc. Expressions or pause fillers of this kind are used to change the topic or to conclude the exchange.

8 Interview with Maria T., Aug 1, 2009, Tayinsha, 6:00. 9 Interview with Galina Z., July 29, 2009, Petropavlovsk, 3:00, 10:00, 18:00. 10 Interview with Maria S., July 27, 2009, Ozernoye, 3:47.

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This category of expressions, together with several other characteristic ones, such as “now it is easier to live but there is no time”11 or “all has been seen, the goodness and the badness,”12 “we were not free” (Russ. мы были несвободные), reveal the way in which the notion of “enslavement” is understood by the narrators. My interviewees point in this way to coercion from the state, a restriction of civil rights and liberties, and an interference of the state with the private lives of individuals. In the Russian linguistic worldview, the term свобода ‘freedom’ defines a state where an individual does not feel restricted or limited in any way, especially spatially. This understanding of freedom assumes also that it is granted and taken away by an external causative force (Wierzbicka, 1997, pp. 138-140). For Kazakhstani Poles, being enslaved (Russ. несвободным) therefore means coercion form state authorities and a feeling of personal enslavement; it means being deprived of the right to choose one’s own walk of life, place of residence, work or education. It is important to note that my interviewees were granted “freedom” quite late, towards the end of their lives, when the ability to decide about one’s own fate is minimal. Their narrations are bitter with the inability to change their traumatic experience and to benefit from the freedom they sought for so long, however it is manifested. Therefore, one has the impression that the majority of my narrators use the word for “freedom” automatically, without a deeper reflection on its meaning. A vast majority of them were born after the deportation and grew up enslaved: it was their permanent state. Only after the collapse of the communist system were they “freed from slavery,” and freedom was bestowed upon them from the outside (as it was, incidentally, taken away from their ancestors by the Communist oppressors). Because they had never experienced freedom before, they find it difficult to describe it, merely saying it is a state that is different from what was before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Therefore, it appears that for Kazakhstani Poles “freedom” simply means “lack of enslavement,” by virtue of the logical proof of assuming the opposite. This is different from the understanding of freedom by the Poles in Poland, who relate to the notion even when talking about the oppressor because they know what is lost or taken away (Бартминьский, 2009, p. 22). Incidentally, they also assume that the understanding of freedom and enslavement is common to all Poles regardless of their place of residence.

11 Interview with Maria B., July 27, 2009, Ozernoye, 8:28. 12 Interview with Anna B., July 27, 2009, Ozernoye, 111:00.

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6. Toward conclusions

The goal of my research was to study the image or view of enslavement in the memory of Kazakhstani Poles, as manifested in the linguistic aspect of their biographical narrations. For this purpose, I used Jerzy Bartmiński’s (2006a, 2009/2012) understanding of the concept of the linguistic worldview. In my opinion, traditional historical research methods are ineffective in reconstructing the everyday life of Soviet Poles, especially because the group did not leave any tangible intellectual legacy such as memoirs or other researchable texts. Only by reaching for “live” source material in the form of recorded interviews, by systematically highlighting questions of language, narration and their interpretation, is it possible to uncover the character of the repressions faced by Poles or other ethnic groups in the Soviet Union. This tallies well with Bartmiński’s (2009/2012, p. 88) stress on the importance of the conceptualizing and speaking subject, his/her type of rationality, intentions, viewpoint, knowledge of the word, or system of values. When studying biographical narratives, it is important to be aware of the significance of the language, structure, form, and genre of specific reports. A consideration of mere facts in a decontextualized fashion is insufficient. To properly interpret oral narratives, it is essential to employ not so much historical but rather linguistic methodology. The oral history interview combines various disciplines and allows for a multi-layered interpretation of reports on the events being described. Thanks to ethnolinguistic methodology for reconstructing the linguistic worldview, analysis of oral history sources allows for discovering the way that Kazakhstani Poles interpret past reality or construct their mental portrait of enslavement. A combination of the perspectives specific to various disciplines facilitates a more convincing, truthful, and richer reconstruction of the portrait. By resorting to the concept of the linguistic worldview, one can see that the interviewees present reality through concrete images, characters, and situations, avoiding abstract thinking. The past in their autobiographical creations seems therefore factual and tangible, with a clear mark left on their individual biographies. The suffering and the feeling of social exclusion were part and parcel of everyday life, rather than something extraordinary. These aspects of the interlocutors’ past are hidden in but also revealed through the linguistic layer of their biographical narratives, especially through their peculiar diction. The concept of linguistic worldview reveals the differences between the understanding of certain notions (here: enslavement) by communities based in and outside their historical homeland, and thus using different varieties of their language. This has been illustrated with the case of the Poles in Poland vs. those in Polish minority communities in the post-Soviet reality of Kazakhstan.

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In order to successfully conduct research among those communities, the scholar must meet certain requirements. First, because the informants have lived in a multilingual context and frequently are bilingual themselves, they may code-switch during the interview and their performance may bear all the signs of the mutual interferences between the languages at play. Therefore, the researcher has to be competent in each of the languages so as to be able to extract the speaker’s message from lexical, grammatical, and stylistic errors or inadequacies. Second, the results of the research must be presented in the most successful manner. This is problematic because a purely academic account is of interest to a restricted number of scholars and does not affect the mentality of the general public. On the other hand, too popular an account risks losing much of the semantic nuancing inherent in the data. A golden means must therefore be found: I hope that the present chapter has achieved just that.

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References

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Name Index

175, 181-182, 184-186, 199-204, A 206-209, 215, 218, 228-229, 245- Abramowicz, Maciej 31, 161, 175, 246, 253, 264, 267, 269, 283-284, 200, 205, 246, 340-341, 344-346 294, 301-302, 305, 309, 321-325, Adamowski, Jan 29, 201, 217-218, 327-332, 334, 339-346, 351-352, 221, 230 Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 421-425, 364-367, 371-376, 381-382, 387- 434 398, 402-404, 425, 433, 436, 444- Ajdukiewicz, Kazimierz 15, 170 446, 455, 461, 463, 469 Alfred, king 361 Beaugrande, Robert 171 Anusiewicz, Janusz 17, 161, 167, 169- Bednarek, Adam 235 170, 388 Benveniste, Émile 268 Apresyan, Yuri 26, 77, 162, 168, 389, Bergsson, Guðbergur 435 391 Berlin, Brent 149 Aquinas 107 Bernárdez, Enrique 20, 420, 433-434 Arendt, Hannah 98 Bielak, Agata 18-19 Aristotle 11, 230, 388, 396 Bielińska-Gardziel, Iwona 161, 175 Arutyunova, N. D. 389 Bikont, Anna 67 Atkins, Beryl T. S. 404 Blixen, Karen 431 Ava, Auður 428, 432 Bloomfield, Morton W. 357-358 Boas, Franz 12-13, 43, 351, 354-355 B Bock, Bettina 208 Bacon, Francis 11, 41 Bock, Philip K. 12-14, 65 Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 172 Bogatyrev, Peter 26 Bakuła, Kordian 246 Bogusławski, Andrzej 26, 231 Balabán, Milan 104 Boguta, Agnieszka 31 Bańko, Mirosław 172, 185 Bonowicz, Michał 308 Baranowski, Władysław 216 Borowski, Leon 47 Barańczak, Stanisław 48, 61, 66, 72, Boryś, Wiesław 284 274 Bowdle, Brian F. 427 Bartmiński, Jerzy 11, 14-20, 26-31, Boye, Kasper 422 62-64, 71, 73, 77-78, 86, 94-95, 102, Bréal, Michel 352 109-110, 116, 121, 125-126, 130, Brodziński, Kazimierz 46-47 137-140, 161-164, 166-171, 174- Brückner, Aleksander 169

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Bruner, Jerome 266 Dressler, Wolfgang U. 171 Brzozowska, Małgorzata 18-19, 50, Druskin, Yakov 125 302-303 Dubisz, Stanisław 184, 202 Burke, Edmund 97 Duns Scotus 11 Burridge, Kate 328 Duszak, Anna 246 Burszta, Wojciech 181 Duszkin, Makism 234 Dyczewski, Leon 208 C Cackowski, Zdzisław 445 E Carnap, Rudolf 170, 380 Evans, Nicholas 419-420, 425 Carrick, Neil 115, 123 Evans, Vyvyan 65-66, 187, 302, 328 Cavanagh, Clare 48, 61, 66-67, 71-72 Evans-Romaine, Karen 115 Cejrowski, Wojciech 377-378 Chaciński, Bartłomiej 401 Charms, Daniil 129 F Chase, Stuart 43 Fabiszak, Małgorzata 387 Chlebda, Wojciech 18, 28, 30, 33, 161, Fateeva, Natal’ya 122 166, 200 Fauconnier, Gilles 61, 65-67, 117, Chomsky, Noam 403 321, 376 Christmann, Hans Helmut 42 Feleszko, Kazimierz 231-233, 237 Cialdini, Robert B. 302 Filar, Dorota 18-19 Clancy, Steven 117-120, 123, 126, Filip, Anastazja 217-218 129, 331 Fillmore, Charles J. 265, 390, 395, 404 Cornwell, Neil 129 Fink, Eugen 79 Coulson, Seana 65 Fink, Hilary L. 123, 125 Croft, William 397 Firbas, Jan 173 Cruse, D. Allan 397 Fischer, Kerstin 331 Czarnowski, Stefan 216 Fish, Stanley 106-107 Czyżewski, Feliks 218 Fleischer, Michael 17, 208-209 Fołtyn, Maria 313 Fonteneau, Elisabeth 434 D Founding Fathers 343 Danaher, David S. 18-19, 71, 77, 95, Francuz, Piotr 268 101-102, 109, 115 Dasher, Richard B. 360-362 Franzen, Jonathan 110 Davidoff, Jules 434 Frege, Gottlob 269 Dąbrowska, Anna 17 Friedrich, Paul 65, 128, 287 Dąbrowska, Ewa 333 Fromm, Erich 105, 107 Déchaine, Rose-Marie 422 Fros, Henryk 221-222 Decius (Roman emperor) 216 Democritus of Abdera 11 G Descartes, René 269 Gadamer, Hans 81 Diewald, Gabriele 422-423 Gamkrelidze, Tamaz V. 203 Dirven, René 228, 321 Gärdenfors, Peter 380 Dixon, Robert M. W. 423 Gebauer, Jan 103 Dokulil, Miloš 230 Geeraerts, Dirk 321, 353, 404 Doroszewski, Witold 138, 140, 153, Gentner, Dedre 427 172, 183-184, 202, 372 Gianninoto, Mariarosaria 344

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Gicala, Agnieszka 18-19 Heil, John 380 Gilson, Étienne 246 Heller, Michał 307 Givón, Talmy 335 Herder, Johann Gottfried 12, 25, 42, 46 Gjallandi, Þorgill 432 Hernas, Czesław 162 Glob, P. V. 431 Hill, Jane H. 13 Glynn, Dylan 331 Hobbes, Thomas 106 Głaz, Adam 16, 18-19, 59, 103, 110, Hodun, Miłosz 306 139, 161-162, 201, 215, 228, 415 Holan, Vladimír 86 Głowienka, Wiktoria 217-218, 221 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 12, 25, 42-43, Głowiński, Michał 284 46, 199, 245, 283, 340-341, 344, 347, Goddard, Cliff 141, 144, 149, 152, 388 334-335 Hume, David 380 Godlewski, Grzegorz 246, 332 Humphrey, Nicholas 105 Goebel, Kazimierz 445 Hymes, Dell 26 Goetz-Stankiewicz, Marketa 104 Goldstein, Julie 434 I Goodenough, Ward H. 26, 174, 264 Ibarretxe-Antuñano, Iraide 419-420, Gowin, Jarosław 308 425 Grabias, Stanisław 246 Ilnicki, Grzegorz 312 Grabowski, Łukasz 29 Indriðason, Arnaldur 428-430 Green, Melanie 187 Ingarden, Roman 47 Greń, Zbigniew 255 Ivanov, Vyacheslav V. 15, 26, 199, Grochowski, Maciej 26, 173 203, 389 Gröndal, Benedikt 427 Gross, Sabine 95 J Jackendoff, Ray 403 Grzegorczykowa, Renata 17, 26, 29, Jäkel, Olaf 266, 272 162, 168, 201, 228, 232, 237, 269, Jakobson, Roman 340 325, 387-389 Jalack, Jenny 115 Grzeszczak, Monika 208 James, William 380 Guerrero, Lilián 420 Janda, Laura 331 Guignard, Jean-Baptiste 421 Jasiński, Tomasz 289 Jażdżewski, Leszek 311 H Jedlicki, Jerzy 310 Habermas, Jürgen 341 Jedliński, Ryszard 208 Habrajska, Grażyna 236 John Paul II 306, 308 Hamann, Johann Georg 12, 42 Johnson, Mark 65, 78, 87, 107, 265- Hamilton, Craig 121, 127 266, 268, 272, 417 Hampe, Beate 265 Jungmann, Josef 81, 103-104 Harasimiuk, Marian 445 Harder, Peter 422 Harris, Roy 16 K Havel, Václav 19, 93-105, 107, 109- Kaburaki, Etsuko 374 110 Kaczan, Anna 205 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 45- Kaczyński, Lech 308 46, 341 Kalman, Jón 431 Heidegger, Martin 80, 83, 85-88, 98 Kamiński, Wiesław 445

Name Index 4 7 7 The Linguistic Worldview Ethnolinguistics, Cognition, and Culture

Kant, Immanuel 123, 230, 344 LaPolla, Randy 335 Kapuściński, Ryszard 284, 288 Laskowski, Roman 228 Kardela, Henryk 29, 162, 228, 236, Latin 47, 81, 103-105, 165, 189, 203, 388 251, 284-285, 292, 302, 317-318, Karolak, Ireneusz 205, 301 324, 372, 418-419 Karolak, Stanisław 228, 233 Latvian 188 Kasprzyk, Jacek 307 Laxness, Halldór 430 Kellner-Heinkele, Barbara 462 Leavitt, John 12 Kenrick, Douglas T. 302 Lec, Stanisław Jerzy 270-271, 275- Kępa-Figura, Danuta 246 276, 278 Kharms, Daniil Ivanovich 19, 115-131 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 12, 25, 41 Khrushchev, Nikita 460 Lenkiewicz, Olga 461 Kiklewicz, Aleksander 26, 162 Le Pen, Jean Marie 347 Kluckhorn, Clyde 13 Le Pen, Marine 347 Kobrinskii, Aleksandr 125-127 Levitz, Greg 301 Kochanowski, Jan 289 Levontina, Irina B. 387 Koch, Peter 118, 122 Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, Barbara Koj, Leon 170 331 Kołakowski, Leszek 459 Lewicki, Andrzej M. 29, 393 Kołłątaj, Hugo 291-292 Libura, Agnieszka 66, 70 Komaromi, Ann 125 Linde, Samuel Bogumił 285-286, 298, Komorowski, Bronisław 301 302 Kopczyńska, Zdzisława 46-47 Lindskoog, Carrie A. 420 Kopińska, Marta 433, 435, 461 Lindskoog, John N. 420 Korżyk, Krzysztof 232, 389 Lippmann, Walter 162, 199, 393 Kowalski, Piotr 221 Lipski, Jan Józef 301 Kozarzewska, Emilia 255 Locke, John 11, 41, 344 Kratochvíl, Zdeněk 81 Lotman, Yuri 26, 47 Kress, Bruno 434 Lubomirski, Karel 79 Kristeva, Julia 461 Lucy, John A. 13, 360 Krumova, Lilia 231-232, 238 Lühr, Rosemarie 208 Krzeszowski, Tomasz P. 209 Luther, Martin 11, 41 Kudela-Świątek, Wiktoria 20, 463, 465 Kundera, Milan 110 Kuno, Susumu 374 Ł Kuroń, Jacek 308 Łeńska-Bąk, Katarzyna 221 Kurzowa, Zofia 185 Łozowski, Przemysław 11, 19, 168, 294, 356, 362, 372 L Lakoff, George 65, 78, 87, 128, 228, M 265-266, 272, 321, 390, 417, 424 Machek, Václav 103 Lalewicz, Janusz 246 Maciejewska, Małgorzata Anna 313 Landau, Jacob M. 462 MacLaury, Robert E. 380 Langacker, Ronald W. 20, 65, 116, 121, Maćkiewicz, Jolanta 14, 17, 168, 201, 124, 228, 230, 263, 265, 321-323, 246, 389 325-327, 330-332, 354, 364, 373, Majer-Baranowska, Urszula 201, 230 381, 388, 390-391, 395-405, 454 Maksymiuk-Pacek, Beata 31

4 7 8 Name Index Edited by: Adam Głaz, David S. Danaher, Przemysław Łozowski

Malinowski, Bronislaw 15, 25, 187, Niebrzegowska-Bartmińska, Stanisława 283, 362-364 16, 19, 29, 31, 139, 161, 168, 171, Mannheim, Bruce 13 175, 215, 246, 253, 329, 373-374 Mańkowska, Maria 208 Nieckuła, Franciszek 246 Marcjanik, Małgorzata 255 Niewęgłowski, Wiesław 221-222 Marín-Arrese, Juana 423 Nijakowski, Lech 32 Markiewicz, Henryk 287 Nitsch, Kazimierz 25 Masłowska, Ewa 201 Norðfjörð, Óttar M. 427, 429 Matczuk, Alicja 31 Norwid, Cyprian Kamil 288 Matlock, Teenie 417, 419, 423, 433 Nowakowska-Kempna, Iwona 302, 306 Mayenowa, Maria Renata 16 Nowosad-Bakalarczyk, Marta 18-19, 230 Maziarski, Wojciech 311 Nycz, Ryszard 161 Mazovia (central Poland) 217-218, 221 Mazur, Jan 246 O Mazurkiewicz-Brzozowska, Małgorzata Ogden, Charles Kay 228 29, 161; see also Mazurkiewicz, Ong, Walter 246 Małgorzata Ott, Christopher 110 Mazurkiewicz, Małgorzata 201; Ożóg, Kazimierz 246 McCready, Eric 424 Melchuk, Igor 162 Ó Mencwel, Andrzej 332 Ólafsdóttir, Auður Ava 428, 432 Mickiewicz, Adam 292-293 Mierzwińska-Hajnos, Agnieszka 20 Mill, John Stuart 380 P Miłosz, Czesław 72, 294 Pajdzińska, Anna 11, 18-19, 29, 50, Minsky, Marvin 265 86-87, 161, 168, 255, 267, 269, 283 Moller, Sabine 467 Palouš, Radim 99 Moszyński, Kazimierz 25 Panasiuk, Jolanta 86, 200 Mukařovský, Jan 48, 85, 88, 340 Pasicka, Małgorzata 334 Munroe, Megan 110 Passent, Daniel 287 Muszyński, Zbysław 28, 268, 389, Patočka, Jan 77-78, 84, 98 393 Pawłowski, Tadeusz 170, 392 Pelcowa, Halina 30, 464 Peterson, Tyler 422-423 N Peyrouse, Sebastien 463 Najder, Zbigniew 309 Piekarczyk, Dorota 18-19, 246 Nakhimovsky, Alice Stone 121 Pinker, Steven 351 Narrog, Heiko 354 Pisarek, Walery 15, 208-209, 301, Nejedlá, Miroslava 106-107 325, 393 Nepop-Ajdaczyć, Lidia 162, 199 Pisarkowa, Krystyna 246, 393 Neubauer, Zdeněk 80, 83 Pitala, Ewelina 205 Neuberg, Steven 302 Plato 11 Newmark, Leonard 357-358 Polański, Kazimierz 228 Nezval, Vítězslav 84 Popowska-Taborska, Hanna 29 Nichols, Schaun 424 Pośpiech, Jerzy 218-220 Niderla, Anna 20, 454 Poujol, Catherine 460

Name Index 4 7 9 The Linguistic Worldview Ethnolinguistics, Cognition, and Culture

Propp, Vladimir 26 character) 126-128 Prorok, Katarzyna 16, 18-19, 139, 161, Sękowska, Elżbieta 208 181-182, 187, 201, 215, 228 Shakespeare, William 344 Purdy, Jedediah 97 Shiffrin, Deborah 246 Pushkin, Alexander Sergeyevich 462 Shipibo-Konibo 420, 424 Putnam, Hilary 26, 162, 199, 390, 393 Shklovsky, Victor 85 Puzynina, Jadwiga 29, 168, 207-208, Sienkiewicz, Henryk 287, 289 388 Sigurðardóttir, Yrsa 428-429 Skácel, Jan 87 Skarga, Piotr 288 Q Skorupka, Stanisław 272, 303 Quintianus (prefect of Catania) 216 Skrzydło, Wiesław 445 Skubalanka, Teresa 246 R Skwarczyńska, Stefania 46 Radden, Günter 321 Smirnova, Elena 422-423 Ranganathan, Shiyali R. 394 Sowa, Franciszek 221-222 Raskin, Victor 290 Spartacus 288, 292 Richards, Ivor Armstrong 228, 362 Stach, Ryszard 443 Riemann, Gerhard 460 Staff, Leopold 293 Roberts, Graham 123, 126 Stalin, Joseph 119 Rocamora, Carol 99, 104 Starmans, Christina 424 Romanowski, Andrzej 287 Staszic, Stanisław 294 Rosch, Eleanor H. 26, 253, 265 Stelmachowska, Bożena 219 Roszko, Roman 233 Stockwell, Peter 121-124 Różyło, Anna 204 Stodola, Ruth Ann 110 Rudnicka, Halina 288 Stomma, Ludwik 216 Rudzka-Ostyn, Brygida 231, 331, 333 Suk-Young Chwe, Michael 302 Sulima, Roch 332 Sweetser, Eve 376, 417-419 S Szacki, Jerzy 307 Sager, Juan C. 172 Szadura, Joanna 203, 230 Sakita, Tomoko I. 445 Szczęsna, Joanna 67 Saloni, Zygmunt 228 Szober, Stanisław 15 Salzmann, Zdenek 355 Szumlewicz, Piotr 313 Sapir, Edward 12-13, 15, 26, 41, 43, Szymanek, Bogdan 228 48, 54, 199, 245, 283, 285, 351, 354- Szymański, Józef 445 355, 358-360, 364, 366, 388 Szymborska, Wisława 19, 48-54, 56, Sarkozy, Nicolas 346 61, 66-67, 70-73, 86 Sauerland, Uli 422-423 Szymczak, Mieczysław 302 Saul, John Ralston 103 Saussure, Ferdinand de 326, 342, 353 Scheler, Max 208 Ś Świda-Ziemba, Hanna 208 Scherer, Wilhelm 46 Schiller, Friedrich 287 Schmid, Hans-Jörg 128 T Schütze, Fritz 460 Tabakowska, Elżbieta 11, 18-19, 62, Seiler, Hans-Jakob 422 64, 162, 246, 267, 324, 373-374, 376, Semyonovich, Semyon (fictional 388, 391, 444-445

4 8 0 Name Index Edited by: Adam Głaz, David S. Danaher, Przemysław Łozowski

Talmy, Leonard 324, 327, 376 Tappolet, Ernst 230 W Walicki, Andrzej 301 Taylor, John R. 116, 253, 265, 397, Wasiuta, Sebastian 31 398, 400 Waszakowa, Krystyna 388 Themerson, Stefan 173 Weisgerber, Leo 12, 25, 42 Þórarinsson, Árni 429 Welzer, Harald 467 Tokarski, Ryszard 28, 86-87, 161, 168, Werenicz, Wiaczesław 462-463 186, 201, 246, 264, 268-269, 283, Whorf, Benjamin Lee 12-13, 15, 26, 325, 332, 389 43, 125, 199, 245, 283, 351, 360, 364, Tolstaya, Svetlana M. 26, 199, 246, 388 389 Wierzbicka, Anna 15-16, 19, 26, 78, Tolstoy, Lev Nikolayevich 462 87, 94, 106-107, 138-139, 141, 144, Tolstoy, Nikita I. 15, 26, 199, 389 149, 151-153, 158, 168, 170, 172, Tomczak, Łukasz 31 184, 186, 229-231, 233-234, 237, Tomicki, Ryszard 216 250, 265-266, 283, 302, 306, 328, Topolińska, Zuzanna 233 332-333, 341, 351, 388-389, 391- Toporov, Vladimir N. 15, 26, 199, 389 393, 395-398, 401, 464, 468 Trabant, Jürgen 341 Wilczewski, Michał 26, 162 Traugott, Elizabeth 360-362 Wilkoń, Aleksander 246 Trzebiński, Jerzy 266 William of Ockham 11 Tschuggnall, Karoline 467 Williams, Raymond 341 Tucano 424 Wilson, Paul 94 Turks 285, 289, 295 Witherspoon, Gary 360 Turner, Mark 65, 85, 87, 117, 321 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 125, 343, 352 Tversky, Amos 380 Wojewódzki, Kuba 301 Tyler, Stephen A. 26 Wolker, Jiří 79-80 Tzotzil 420 Wysocka, Aneta 18-19 Wysoczański, Włodzimierz 387 U Uličný, Oldřich 105 Y Underhill, James W. 12-13, 16, 19, 25, Yankelevich, Matvei 120, 129 28, 43, 64, 339 Ungerer, Friedrich 128 Uziak, Stanisław 445 Z Zabłocki, Franciszek 291 V Zagajewski, Adam 72 van Dijk, Teun 246, 301-302 Zaleski, Wincenty 221-222 Vaněk (fictional character) 104 Zalizniak, Anna A. 387 Vaňková, Irena 18-19, 48, 85-87, 94- Zaron, Zofia 26, 387 95, 98, 110, 199, 269, 279 Zauner, Adolf 230 Vasmer, Max 271 Zgółkowa, Halina 172, 184 Vergara, José 18-19, 110 Zinken, Jörg 26, 162, 199, 366-367, Vermeulen, Jeroen 358 387-388, 393-394, 397 Verspoor, Marjolijn 228 Vojtěch, Daniel 110 Ż Vvendensky, Alexander 115 Żuk, Grzegorz 11, 15, 17, 206-207, Vygotsky, Lev 433 302

Name Index 4 8 1 The Linguistic Worldview Ethnolinguistics, Cognition, and Culture

Żuliński, Leszek 312 Бартминьский, Ежи 468 Żygulski, Zdzisław 289 Калмыков, C. 462 Żywicka, Beata 203 Макеев, И. 462 Мокиенко, B. 465-466 Никитина, T. 465-466 Ананьева, H. 463 Ожегов, C. 465-466 Аренов, M. 462 Шведова, H. 465-466

4 8 2 Name Index Edited by: Adam Głaz, David S. Danaher, Przemysław Łozowski

Subject Index

Archive of Oral History, AOH/UMCS A 445-452 access node 397-398, 454 Asia 164, 167, 343 actionality 238 aspect Addressee/addressee 51, 169-170, imperfective 238 247, 254-255, 257, 361 perfective 238 ad-linguistic data 18, 168, 186, 215; a-temporal 237 see also co-linguistic data Australia 26, 31, 138, 332 Agent/agent 54, 121, 127-129, 169- Australian English 332 170, 257, 302, 359-360 Australian languages 138, 419 American and European Cognitive Austria 79, 284 Linguistics, A/ECL 321, 324, 326-331 axiology 29, 200, 206-208, 301, 305, American English 334, 346 445, 449, 453 analogists 41 Ancient Greece 11, 41, 45, 164, 189, B 267, 339 base image 199 Ancient Rome 45, 164, 216 base (mental space) 66, 68-70 angle of seeing 374-375, 378-379 base (morphological) 81, 227, 420 anomalists 41 base (vs. profile) 121, 398 anthropocentrism 15, 44, 51, 56, 78, Basque 420 139, 245, 264-265, 270, 276, 387 Being 81 anthropological-cultural ethnolin- in Havel 96-100, 102-105 guistics 26 Belarus 342 anthropological-cultural linguistics Belgium 342 229 Blended Prototype Model 118 anthropological linguistics 12, 181, blending 65, 116-118, 121, 129 228, 283, 340 British Columbia 54 anthropology 25-26, 149, 182, 199, British National Corpus 346 332, 362, 364, 395, 425 anthropomorphization 80, 129 antonymy 168, 287, 303 C arbitrariness (of the sign) 45, 149, camera angle 374 228, 326, 331, 353, 363 Canada 54 archetype 232 Career of Metaphor Hypothesis 427

Subject Index 4 8 3 The Linguistic Worldview Ethnolinguistics, Cognition, and Culture

Cartesians 46 cognitive psychology 14, 26, 263, Catania 216 268, 373, 379 categories cognitive semantics 87, 265 cognitive-semantic 117 cognitive structure 170, 174, 188, grammatical 19, 45, 54, 162, 227- 313, 327, 329, 391, 396 229, 327, 363 co-linguistic data 18-19, 26, 168, in Aristotle 230, 396 186, 192, 215, 389; see also ad- inflectional 229-230 linguistic data lexical 227-230, 322 collection 170, 188-189 linguistic 227-230, 232, 422 collective memory 30, 32-33, 284, morphological 227-229 460 ontological 396 collective set 236-237 phonological 227, 229 collective symbols 209 semantic 187, 215, 227, 229, collocation 70-71, 73, 83, 86, 139, 232, 403 162, 165, 171, 201, 234, 247, 254- superordinate 138, 140, 149, 153, 255, 271-272, 274-275, 277, 279, 185, 189, 317-318 290-291, 293, 371, 415, 452 syntactic 227, 229-230 communication 32, 41-42, 48, 77, 80, word-formational 227-228, 230 82, 85, 88, 116, 125, 170, 172-173, categorization 16, 32, 84, 137, 141, 182, 186, 199, 229-230, 232, 234, 149, 163, 172, 183, 188, 199, 228- 240, 246-248, 252-259, 265, 288, 229, 231, 233, 245, 253, 294, 371, 316, 321, 330, 354, 357, 361, 371- 380, 393-394, 396, 461 372, 389, 403-404, 462-463 Central Europe 341 communicative dynamism 173 Cha’palaachi 420 communicative intention 116, 172, Chinese 344 404 Christianity 216, 221, 288, 295, 306, complex 188-189 339 conceptual disintegration 61 Christmas 64, 191, 192, 307 conceptual integration 65 Cialdini, Robert B. 302 conceptualization 15, 25-26, 44, 62, Coca (Corpus of Contemporary Ameri- 65, 85, 96, 109, 116, 120, 122, 125, can English) 346 140, 163, 168, 182-183, 185, 228, cognitive definition, CD 16, 19, 28, 263-268, 277, 279, 293, 323, 331, 30, 110, 137, 139-140, 149, 161- 352, 376, 378-381, 387, 389, 391, 162, 164, 166-168, 170-175, 181- 396, 398, 404 182, 186-187, 192, 199, 201-206, conceptual matrix 399 215, 334, 388, 390-398, 403, 435 Conceptual Metaphor Theory 417, cognitive ethnolinguistics 26, 77, 421 125, 130, 162, 187, 229, 322, 351, conceptual semantics 263 364, 425, 433, 435, 437 conceptual structure 232, 264, 325, Cognitive Grammar 65, 116, 121, 389, 397 124, 230, 265 conceptual system 64, 395 cognitive linguistics 19, 65, 78, 126, connotation 43, 49, 77, 81, 83, 85-88, 162, 181, 228, 263, 283, 354, 364, 162, 168, 186-187, 249, 293, 391, 388-389 393-394, 396 cognitive play 115-116, 118-119, consciousness 14, 42-43, 83, 103, 121, 123, 125-126, 128 106, 108, 187, 201, 218, 392, 445

4 8 4 Subject Index Edited by: Adam Głaz, David S. Danaher, Przemysław Łozowski

construal 116, 123-124, 128, 130, definition 85, 108, 137, 165, 171- 373-374, 381, 459, 461 173, 264, 372, 391, 403-404, 422 content adequacy 168, 392 Aristotelian 84 context 16, 50, 56, 71, 85-87, 165, axiomatic 170 170, 173, 187, 200, 236, 252, 269, classical 182, 265 272, 283, 286, 292, 302, 311-312, contextual 170, 172 323, 328, 342, 397, 455 dictionary 49, 140, 164, 184, 342 minimal diagnostic 170 encyclopedic 166-167, 172, 186 of situation 187 entangled 170 situational 173 extended 103 convention folk 393 linguistic 57, 107-108, 122, 204, fragmentary 392 228, 235, 324, 353 functional 393 social 17, 461 lexicographic 164, 166-167, 171, conventionalization 14, 17, 18, 56, 186, 202, 285-287, 390-392 64, 187, 215, 251, 268, 272, 279, maximum 185 284, 293, 326, 333, 424 minimal 185 conversational hierarchy 51 nominal 165 copula 172 poetic 84 corpus 20, 28-29, 201, 331, 344-346, range-based 172 420, 425-426 reality-cum-semantics 172 countability 153, 232-236, 240 scientific 183, 185, 424 Cratylus (by Plato) 11 semantic 415 structural 172 Crimea 289 taxonomic 185, 390, 393 cross-cultural 31, 283, 310, 332, 424 through postulates 170 cross-linguistic 31, 421, 423 demonstrative adjective 73 cultural common ground 290, 302, deontic 69, 175, 361, 446 305, 311, 313 Desana 419 cultural common knowledge 302 dialectology 25, 29-30, 199, 389 cultural knowledge 137, 302 differentia specifica 183, 286 cultural semantics 26, 151 diminutive 204, 217, 227, 332 Czech 19, 48, 77, 80-83, 85-86, 93- directionality 230, 351, 366-367, 94, 96, 100-104, 106-109, 129, 188, 374-375, 378-379 331, 340, 344, 346-347 discourse 14, 16, 32, 61, 65-67, 70, Czechoslovakia 98, 100-101 81, 83, 87, 182, 246, 254, 256, 284, Czech Republic 100, 342, 346 286, 292-293, 301, 305-306, 308, 311-313, 322, 327-328, 330, 341- 342, 377, 387, 460, 463 D liberal-Catholic 305-306 Danish 415-418, 431, 433, 437 discrete 232, 234-235, 237-239, 397 DCQT (SKAT) formula 28 definiendum 172-173 distance 70, 376, 379, 380-381 definiens 172-173, 392 cognitive 20, 371, 378, 380-382 defining sentences 170, 174, 187, epistemic 69 215 mental 376 definiteness 54, 116, 119, 121-122, perspectival 376 232-235, 237-240 physical 381

Subject Index 4 8 5 The Linguistic Worldview Ethnolinguistics, Cognition, and Culture

distributive set 236-237 ethnolinguistics 15, 20, 25-33, 78, domain 65, 323, 395, 399-404 93-95, 98, 109, 137, 161-162, 181- abstract 266, 399 182, 186-187, 199, 227, 229, 259, basic 398 330, 339-340, 365-367, 389, 403 central 401 ethnosyntax 332, 334 cognitive 323, 395, 398, 402 Etnolingwistyka (journal) 15, 26, 27- conceptual 416 31, 201, 229 lexico-semantic 44 etymology 18, 44, 81, 96, 103-105, peripheral 402 108, 168-169, 188, 199, 203, 266, semantic 415 271, 284, 302, 317-318, 323-324, source 50, 329, 417 326, 335, 372 target 329, 418 EUROJOS 31, 161, 175, 200 domain matrix 20, 390, 396-398, Europe 25, 31, 50, 101, 106-107, 400-402, 404 164, 207, 217, 284, 292, 295, 306, durative 237 308-309, 312-313, 317-318, 321, dynamic 44, 63, 124, 279, 294, 328, 326, 330, 339, 342, 347, 353, 390, 334, 389, 396-398, 401-402, 404 422-423, 437 dynamicity 404 evidentiality 417, 421-425, 432 dynamics 29 existentialism 120 dynamism 44 experience 15, 32, 44, 53-54, 56, 63-65, 77-78, 80, 82-86, 88, 98-99, E 101-103, 105, 115-116, 120-121, Easter 190, 221 128, 137, 152, 163, 174-175, 231, Eastern Europe 347 259, 264, 279, 329, 342-344, 352, embodiment 268, 417 354, 356-364, 366, 389, 391, 398, encyclopedia 64, 137, 164, 166-167, 403-404, 418, 423-424, 432, 450- 169-172, 186, 342, 344, 390-391, 452, 454, 460-461, 463, 468 397-399, 401-404 experiential base 182 English 18, 20, 25, 43, 48, 50, 52, 54, experientialism 268 56, 58, 61-62, 66-67, 72-73, 83, 93- 94, 96, 101-109, 124, 128-130, 137- F 139, 145, 149, 151-152, 158, 162, facet 28, 33, 170, 172, 187, 201, 215, 185, 201, 265, 271, 279, 284-285, 323, 340, 343-344, 391, 394-397, 321-322, 324-325, 331-332, 334, 404 341, 343-344, 346-347, 352-353, field of vision 374-381 359, 372, 387, 390, 396, 416-418, fieldwork 188, 201 420, 423, 437, 464; see also Ameri- figurative 81, 331, 426, 435 can English; Australian English; Scot- figure-ground alignment 376, 379, tish English 381 Enlightenment 45, 285, 288, 291- finalization 172 292 flagship words 209 epistemic 68-69, 361, 415, 417-418, focusing 323, 373 423, 425, 427-428, 433, 435-437 focus of attention 121, 379 ethnography 25, 152-153, 389, 392 folk 15, 19, 27, 45, 63, 137-139, Ethnolinguistic Archive, Lublin 188, 145, 152, 162-163, 167-171, 173, 445 181-182, 187-189, 191-192, 195,

4 8 6 Subject Index Edited by: Adam Głaz, David S. Danaher, Przemysław Łozowski

202-203, 215-218, 221, 331, 335, iconicity 70, 72, 324, 328-329 339, 342, 387, 392-393, 395, 424- Idealised Cognitive Model 390, 395 425, 463 image schema 265 folklore 15-16, 25-27, 32, 162, 181- indefiniteness 54, 72, 232-233, 235- 182, 326, 330, 335, 464 236, 238-239 Founding Fathers 343 individualism 268, 381, 450 frame 28, 48, 57, 65, 170, 200, 229, Indochina 420 231, 265, 366, 381, 388, 390, 395, Indo-European 203, 417-418 404 inflection 228, 230 frame of reference 48, 57 inhaltbezogene Grammatik 42 France 340-341, 345 Instrument 169 French 238, 340-341, 344-346, 418 integrationist (approach) 16 French Revolution 346 intentionality 79, 171 intersubjectivity 15, 106, 245, 264, G 291, 331, 387 Gazeta Wyborcza (a daily), GW 164, Islam 289-290 306, 308-313 iterative 237-238 gender (cultural) 230, 276 gender (grammatical) 46, 54, 227 generic knowledge 65 J Japan 31, 100, 342 genus proximum 140, 183, 286 Język a kultura (a book series) 32 German 12, 25, 42-43, 46, 62, 80-81, Johai 420 138, 190, 245, 283, 286, 328, 341, 343-344, 346-347, 352, 371-372, 388, 418, 466 K Germany 12, 342 Kashubia (north-central Poland) 190, gesture 14, 17, 80, 120, 250, 273- 219, 372 274, 345, 354, 444 Katyń 308 Google 346, 434-435 Kavárna (magazine) 93 grammaticalization 422 Kazakhstan 20, 459-464, 468-469 Great Terror 459 key word 73, 94-96, 102, 109-110, Greek 79, 98, 103, 203, 230, 289, 301, 449, 464 418 knowledge base 398 knowledge network 397 H Kolyma Yukaghir 434 hagiography 216-217 Kujawy (central Poland) 218 historiography 30 Kwakiutl 54 holism 168, 230, 233, 389, 394, 398 homo audiens 330 homo loquens 229-330, 333, 367, 403 L humanistic thought 32 language acquisition 200 hyperonymy 165, 168, 392, 394 language subsystems 227-228 hyponymy 168, 285 language system 12-13, 17-19, 26, 28, 47, 57, 86, 162, 168, 171, 186, 200- I 201, 227, 246, 268-269, 284-285, Icelandic 20, 415-418, 425-426, 431, 341, 345, 353, 358, 360, 389, 392 433-437 langue 330; cf. parole

Subject Index 4 8 7 The Linguistic Worldview Ethnolinguistics, Cognition, and Culture

Latin 47, 81, 103-105, 165, 189, 203, 283, 303-304, 321-322, 340-342, 251, 284-285, 292, 302, 317-318, 344, 445, 452 324, 372, 418-419 Lublin School of Ethnolinguistics 18, Latvian 188 20, 26, 28-31, 61-62, 283, 285, 321, lexicon 42, 44, 51, 63, 137, 152, 209, 334, 339, 340-343, 347, 387-389, 437 215, 254, 288, 327, 340, 404, 461 lexis 42-43, 102, 162, 207, 230, 264- M 265, 271, 277, 279, 284, 290, 301, Malaysia 420 327-328, 331-332, 334, 403, 447 Martial Law (in Poland) 447 Lidové Noviny (newspaper) 346 Mazovia (central Poland) 217-218, line of sight 374-375, 378-379 221 linguification 33 mental object 16, 167, 175, 182, 192, linguistic-cultural worldview, LCWV 215, 390, 436 17, 20, 181; see also linguistic world- mental-space lattice 61, 66-67, 70- view, LWV; worldview 71, 73 linguistic evidence 168, 171, 174, mental spaces 61, 62, 65-68, 70-71, 186-187, 192 72-73, 328, 376 linguistic image of the world 387; see metaphor 14, 44, 49-51, 56, 63, 85, also linguistic worldview, LWV 87, 96, 98, 105, 116, 118, 128-129, linguistic picture of the world 352, 165, 171, 188-189, 201, 203-204, 387, 396; see also linguistic world- 206, 266, 270-272, 276-278, 286, view, LWV 291-292, 324, 329, 332-333, 361- linguistic relativity 13, 43-44 362, 373-374, 378, 395, 417, 419- linguistic stereotyping 376 421, 425-426, 433, 437, 463 linguistic worldview, LWV 11-20, 26- artistic 50 27, 29-33, 41-42, 44, 47-48, 50-51, cognitive 266 57, 61-64, 70-73, 77, 85-87, 94, 125, conceptual 52, 56, 128, 265, 329, 130, 140, 161-162, 168, 182, 199- 421, 425, 437 200, 202-203, 207, 215, 245-247, conventionalized 56, 293 250, 263-265, 268, 283-284, 301- creative 270 302, 322, 324, 329, 332, 334, 352, lexicalized 279, 286, 290 367, 371-372, 382, 387-389, 392, linguistic 50, 52 396-397, 403-404, 433, 435, 437, ontological 266 445, 460, 461, 468-469; see also primary 417, 420-421 linguistic-cultural worldview, LCWV; metonymy 56, 85, 116, 118, 120, 122, worldview 271, 276, 287, 291, 329, 417, 425 literal 67, 69, 108, 120, 130, 139, Middle Ages 11, 41, 81, 289, 435 192, 207, 251, 271, 291, 331, 334, Middle English, MidE 361 401, 431, 435 Middle High German, MHG 418 literature 45-47, 57, 72, 93-95, 110, mind 41, 63, 97, 102, 187, 230, 263, 115, 119, 129, 130, 173, 238, 287, 265-266, 271-276, 278, 293, 295, 289, 303, 342, 344, 364-365 322, 347, 360, 380, 391 Lithuania 307, 342 morpheme 157, 228, 327 Lithuanian 188 morphosyntax 327, 334 Lublin, Poland 14-16, 18-20, 26, Moscow Semantic School 31, 388 29-31, 154, 161-163, 181-182, 186- multi-categoriality 139 188, 199, 217-218, 229-230, 259, Muslim 295

4 8 8 Subject Index Edited by: Adam Głaz, David S. Danaher, Przemysław Łozowski

oral history 20, 445, 460, 469 N Ottoman Empire 289 naiver Sprachrealismus 25 outlook 373 narration 161, 266-267, 461, 469 narrative 30, 33, 85, 110, 115, 170, 265-267, 279, 366, 387, 432, 459- 462, 464-465, 469 P panchrony 283, 294 narrator 128-129, 267, 378-381, parole 330; cf. langue 449, 452-454, 460-461, 464, 467 partitive 233-235, 237, 392 Native American languages 43 partonomy 168, 393 naturalism 268 Patient/patient 121, 127-129, 169 Natural Semantic Metalanguage 19, Pennsylvania Mennonite communi- 151-152, 250, 388, 392 ties 328 natural world 77-78, 80, 83-84, 356 People’s Republic of Poland 308, Navajo 13 446, 453 Neo-Humboldtians 12, 42-43 perception 15, 25, 28, 43, 62, 79, network model 454 168, 185, 231-232, 245, 247, 264, New World 343 324-327, 362, 367, 382, 387-389, NKVD (People’s Commissariat for 403, 417-419, 425-426, 432-436, Internal Affairs) 308 440, 445 nominalists 11, 41 perceptual information 65 non-discrete 237 Persia 353 non-figurative 426 perspective 28, 161, 182, 268, 323- Nootka 54 324, 328, 371-376, 378, 394-397, norm 17, 45, 174-175, 234, 239-240, 404 403 perspective point 376 North Africa 343 Peru 420 NSM, see Natural Semantic Metalan- phenomenology 47, 77-78, 80, 83, guage 88, 264 number (grammatical category) 54, phraseme 157 162, 227, 233, 240 phraseology 15, 85-86, 94, 152, 169, numeral 232-234, 239-240 171, 201, 229, 303, 329, 365, 391 phýsei 41; cf. thései O planes of seeing 374, 376, 381 objectification 14, 170, 173, 325 pluralis 233 objectivity 31, 42, 69, 77, 80, 149, poetry 13-14, 17, 19, 28-29, 45-48, 165-166, 169, 184, 228, 232, 263, 50, 53-54, 56-57, 62, 64-67, 70, 72- 276-277, 322, 324, 333, 371, 381, 73, 77, 84-88, 115, 268, 279, 303, 432 376, 387 observation point 374-375, 379 peasant 188, 198 Old English, OE 361, 418 point of view 26, 28, 32, 51, 72, 121, Old French 372 170, 188, 216, 268, 276, 323, 328, Old Polish 103, 169, 371 371, 373, 394, 396-397, 461, 464, Ommura 419 467; see also vantage point; view- Ongee Andamanese 420 point onomasiology 230 Poland 14, 18, 25, 29, 32, 46, 101, ontology 172 161, 181, 188, 190, 195, 198, 206,

Subject Index 4 8 9 The Linguistic Worldview Ethnolinguistics, Cognition, and Culture

217-220, 237, 284, 289, 293-294, 425, 444 303, 305-312, 318, 321, 331, 334, Prussia 284 340, 372, 390, 447, 452-453, 463, punctual 237-238 468-469 Polish 15, 18-20, 27-28, 31-32, 47-52, 54, 56, 61, 67, 72-73, 81, 83, Q 86, 103-104, 137-140, 145, 149, quantifier 174, 233 151-152, 162-164, 167-168, 171, Quechua 423 173, 181-185, 187-189, 192, 200- questionnaire 17-19, 28, 29, 168, 203, 205-207, 215-217, 227, 233, 186, 201, 208, 285, 301, 303-305, 236, 245-246, 248-249, 251-256, 331, 341, 392 259, 263, 266, 270-279, 283, 285- 288, 290, 292-293, 295, 301, 303, 309-311, 313, 317, 322-324, 327, R 331-333, 339-340, 342, 344-347, realists 11, 41 356-357, 371-376, 381, 387, 396, reason 103, 106-108, 266, 271-273, 401, 461-463, 469 294 Polish Academy of Sciences 29, 31, reconceptualization 87-88, 102 200 red series (a book series) 31, 161, Polish Cognitive Studies, PCS 19, 321, 335 321-332, 334-335 rheme 173 politics 14, 29, 97, 101-102, 109, Roman Catholic 216-217, 221 205-209, 284, 288, 292, 294, 301- Romanticism 46-47, 288, 308 303, 305-310, 312-313, 341, 342- Russia 31, 32, 119, 284, 307, 342, 343, 346, 447-449, 453, 455, 465 463 Polityka (a weekly) 306, 308-309, Russian 15, 19, 26-27, 77, 116-117, 312 122, 126-131, 137-138, 149, 151, 158, polysemy 168, 254, 256, 287, 391, 188, 266, 283, 288, 308, 331, 333, 396 337, 344, 389, 461-464, 466-468 Pomerania (northern Poland) 218- Russian Federation 462 219 Portuguese 418, 423 S possessive adjective 56, 71, 73 salience 42, 56, 168, 323, 329, 364, Prague Linguistic School 340 366, 373, 402 predicate-argument structure 255 Sapir-Whorf hypothesis 43, 388 predication 122, 232, 237 scanning 116, 119, 123, 125 presupposition 27, 102, 116, 269, sequential 124 284, 291, 293, 301, 447 summary 123, 124 profile 31, 161, 199, 309, 311, 317- schema 105, 232, 240, 265-267, 404 318, 322, 398 schematicity 327, 373, 381 profiling 78, 84, 121, 161, 182, 199, Scottish English 347 240, 323, 342-343, 372, 394-397 script 26, 85, 265, 290 Proto-Indo-European 18, 203, 285 Sedang Moy 420 Proto-Slavic 266 self 101, 108, 128, 268, 443-444 prototype 49, 79, 82, 86-88, 115- self-presentation 20, 443-444, 453- 116, 118, 123, 128-129, 139, 253, 455 259, 265, 322, 326, 343, 357, 395, semantic map 118

4 9 0 Subject Index Edited by: Adam Głaz, David S. Danaher, Przemysław Łozowski

semantic molecules 141, 144, 151, 169, 171, 173-174, 182, 199- 152 200, 229, 269, 305, 309, 330, semantic primes/primitives 16, 139, 367, 372, 403, 443-444, 469 144, 157, 172, 231, 398 thinking 19, 263, 268-270, 277- semantic structure 77, 255-258, 286, 279 322, 371-372, 394, 398 subjecthood 267 semantic value 47, 96, 110, 397 subjectification 323, 325, 327 semasiology 230 subjectivity 11, 15, 28, 32, 33, 77, 80, semiotics of culture 26 96, 100, 121, 125, 149, 166, 169- semiotic triangle 228, 325 170, 181, 184, 199, 232, 245, 263- Sensor 169 265, 268-270, 276, 286, 324-325, separatist (approach) 16 327, 329, 331, 334, 371, 381, 387, Serbia 32, 342 394, 444 Silesia (south-central Poland) 217- Suya 419 218, 220 synonymy 168, 183, 276, 303, 324 Slavic 26-27, 31, 117, 163, 188, 199- syntagmatic relations 168 200, 207, 233, 266, 284, 331, 334, 339-340 T Slovakia 342 Tariana 424 Smolensk airplane crash 308 Tatars 285, 289, 295 social psychology 30, 302, 443 tertium comparationis 33 sociology 12, 25, 30, 208, 301, 392, text 421, 454 of culture 19, 161, 171, 173-175 Soviet 308, 459-463, 465-469 oral 19, 221, 245-249, 251-254, space builder 66, 68-69 258-259 Spanish 418, 420, 423 written 19, 245-248, 250-254, specificity 327, 373, 381 256, 258-259, 435 Sprachdenken 344, 347 textuality, criteria of 171 sprachliches Weltbild 12, 43 thései 41; cf. phýsei sprachliche Zwischenwelt 43 Third Polish Republic 305 stabilized features 187, 201 Þórarinsson, Árni 429 standpoint 373 topoi (loci communes) 388 stereotype 19, 28, 29, 63-64, 87, translation equivalence 61-62, 71, 73 161-162, 168, 170-172, 174, 182, Tucano 424 187, 199-201, 207, 209, 283-284, Turks 285, 289, 295 322, 342-343, 390, 393, 395, 437 Tygodnik Powszechny (a weekly), TP stereotyped texts 17, 27, 169, 188, 306-309, 311-313 201, 286, 301 Tzotzil 420 structural semantics 28 subcategory 169, 170, 201, 233, 285, 323, 394-395 U subject Ukraine 32, 342, 459, 463 categorizing 199 uncountability 153, 232, 235-236, of thinking 263, 267, 269-270, 240 275, 278-279 unit 327 perceiving 62, 199, 352 communicative 327, 403 speaking 26, 28, 32, 62, 94, 161, linguistic 171, 327

Subject Index 4 9 1 The Linguistic Worldview Ethnolinguistics, Cognition, and Culture

of classification 227 viewpoint space 66, 328, 376 semantic 398-399 symbolic 397 United Kingdom 32 W United States 31-32 Weltansicht 12, 43, 341, 388 untranslatability 109 Weltanschauung 12, 18 usage-based model 331 Wikipedia 107-108 word formation 44, 56, 82, 94, 144, 227-230, 329, 365 V world view 11, 14, 43, 324 vagueness 121, 168, 266, 293-294, 422 world-view 11-12, 324 valuation 17, 44, 137, 161, 166, 168- worldview 12-14, 18, 25, 42, 48, 61, 169, 175, 182, 199-202, 215, 376, 116, 140, 172, 174, 283, 324, 332- 390, 403, 436 333, 339-342, 344, 347, 425, 434, values 15, 19, 29, 31-32, 48, 65, 94, 444 109, 116, 121, 174-175, 199-201, auctorial 18, 57, 286 204, 207-209, 217, 229, 245, 264, cultural 17, 31, 215, 322 266, 268, 276, 284, 286, 301, 310- 311, 313, 322, 342, 365, 367, 387, folk 229 403, 425, 447, 453, 469 global 17 vantage point 371, 373, 434; cf. also idiosyncratic 70 point of view; viewpoint naive 186 Vantage Theory 380 poetic 18, 62 verba dicendi 256-258 scientific 15 viewpoint 44, 61, 66, 70, 71, 73, 137, textual 17 161, 167, 174, 182, 184, 199, 229, see also linguistic-cultural 309, 323, 328, 371-376, 379, 394- worldview, LCWV; linguistic 397, 404, 444-445, 452, 463, 469; cf. worldview, LWV also point of view; vantage point World War II 290, 294, 302-303

4 9 2 Subject Index