Научная статья на тему 'Cognitive analysis of gender metaphores in multiple languages'

Cognitive analysis of gender metaphores in multiple languages Текст научной статьи по специальности «Языкознание и литературоведение»

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Ключевые слова
ЯЗЫК / LANGUAGE / ПОЛ / GENDER / МЕТАФОРА / METAPHOR / МУЖЕСТВЕННОСТЬ / MASCULINITY / ФЕМИНИЗМ / FEMINISM / ВОСПРИЯТИЕ / PERCEPTION / ДИСКУРС / DISCOURSE

Аннотация научной статьи по языкознанию и литературоведению, автор научной работы — Mirzazadeh U.M.

In language, a metaphor is defined as an indirect comparison between two or more seemingly unrelated subjects. The metaphor is sometimes further analyzed in terms of its ground and tension. The ground consists of the similarities between the tenor and the vehicle. The tension consists of the dissimilarities between the tenor and the vehicle. Social labeling practices offer a window on the construction of gendered identities and social relations. The article considers a system of metaphorical nominations of a human as the way of linguistic marking of interpretation and evaluation of various aspects of human activity. Various cognitive processes manipulate a person’s schemata and one of them is gender. Gender is often defined as a social category system that is built around the distinction of male and female; however, it has also been suggested that objects and features of a person’s world can be metaphorically associated with the concept.

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КОГНИТИВНЫЙ АНАЛИЗ ГЕНДЕРНЫХ МЕТАФОР В РАЗНОСИСТЕМНЫХ ЯЗЫКАХ

В языке метафора определяется как косвенное сравнение двух или более, казалось бы, несвязанных предметов. Иногда метафора анализируется с точки зрения её основания и напряженности. Основание состоит из сходства между смыслом речи и средством выражения. Напряжение состоит из различий между смыслом речи и средством выражения. Практики социальной маркировки предлагают окно с построением гендерных идентичностей и социальных отношений. В статье рассматривается система метафорических номинаций человека как способ лингвистической окраски интерпретации и оценки различных аспектов человеческой деятельности. Различные когнитивные процессы манипулируют схемой человека одним из них является гендер. Гендер часто определяется как система социальной категории, которая строится вокруг различия между мужчиной и женщиной; однако также было высказано предположение, что объекты и особенности человеческого мира могут быть метафорически связаны с концептом.

Текст научной работы на тему «Cognitive analysis of gender metaphores in multiple languages»

УДК 81'44

Mirzazadeh U.M., postgraduate, teacher of Linguoculturology Department, Azerbaijan University of Languages

(Baku, Azerbaijan), E-mail: [email protected]

COGNITIVE ANALYSIS OF GENDER METAPHORES IN MULTIPLE LANGUAGES. In language, a metaphor is defined as an indirect comparison between two or more seemingly unrelated subjects. The metaphor is sometimes further analyzed in terms of its ground and tension. The ground consists of the similarities between the tenor and the vehicle. The tension consists of the dissimilarities between the tenor and the vehicle. Social labeling practices offer a window on the construction of gendered identities and social relations. The article considers a system of metaphorical nominations of a human as the way of linguistic marking of interpretation and evaluation of various aspects of human activity. Various cognitive processes manipulate a person's schemata and one of them is gender. Gender is often defined as a social category system that is built around the distinction of male and female; however, it has also been suggested that objects and features of a person's world can be metaphorically associated with the concept.

Key words: language, gender, metaphor, masculinity, feminism, perception, discourse.

У.М. Мирзазаде, соискатель, преп. каф. лингвокультурологии, Азербайджанский университет языков, г. Баку,

E-mail: [email protected]

КОГНИТИВНЫЙ АНАЛИЗ ГЕНДЕРНЫХ МЕТАФОР В РАЗНОСИСТЕМНЫХ ЯЗЫКАХ

В языке метафора определяется как косвенное сравнение двух или более, казалось бы, несвязанных предметов. Иногда метафора анализируется с точки зрения её основания и напряженности. Основание состоит из сходства между смыслом речи и средством выражения. Напряжение состоит из различий между смыслом речи и средством выражения. Практики социальной маркировки предлагают окно с построением гендерных идентичностей и социальных отношений. В статье рассматривается система метафорических номинаций человека как способ лингвистической окраски интерпретации и оценки различных аспектов человеческой деятельности. Различные когнитивные процессы манипулируют схемой человека - одним из них является гендер. Гендер часто определяется как система социальной категории, которая строится вокруг различия между мужчиной и женщиной; однако также было высказано предположение, что объекты и особенности человеческого мира могут быть метафорически связаны с концептом.

Ключевые слова: язык, пол, метафора, мужественность, феминизм, восприятие, дискурс.

The word 'metaphor' derives from the Greek ^ETapspEiv ('to carry across') and it is therefore no surprise to find one of the earliest treatments in Western philosophy in the works of Aristotle [1]. Defining it as 'an application of an alien name by transference' in his Poetics, he further elaborates in his Rhetoric that a metaphor has to 'correspond to the thing signified'. For Aristotle, then, metaphor was less the interplay between different domains but rather constituted what was later called the source domain, in terms of which something else is defined. Aristotle thus prefigured the modern view of metaphor as ubiquitous, but differed in that he regarded it as a purely linguistic, rather than a cognitive, phenomenon [1]. In modern times, I.A. Richards' Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936) is widely cited as an important contribution to metaphor theory [2, p. 13]. Writing in the Romantic tradition, he advanced that imagination and metaphor shape our perception of the world and clearly took a cognitive view of metaphor when saying that 'thought is metaphoric ... and the metaphors of language derive there from'. Richards further distinguished between the tenor (target domain), vehicle (source domain) and ground of a metaphor; in the cliched gendered metaphor women are flowers, for example, women are the vehicle, i.e. that which is conceptualized in terms of something else, and flowers are the tenor, i.e. the terms in which the vehicle is thought of, while the ground for comparison is semantic features such as fragile or beautiful.

Gender can be defined as being a social category system that is built around the distinction between male and female [3, p. 317]. Bem suggested that this distinction "serves as a basic organizing principle for every human culture" [4, p.354]. Leinback, Hort, & Fagot supported Bem's view proposing that every known human society has their own roles, language, occupations, accoutrements and behaviors that are appropriate for each sex. For the purposes of this study, sex will refer to the dichotomous classification of people being either male or female and gender will refer to the dimensions of masculinity and femininity [5, p. 110].

The publication of Judith Butler's landmark book Gender Trouble in 1990 ushered in a new era in language and gender research that signalled a radical break with the approaches outlined above. The deficit, dominance and difference views have in common an essentialist belief in gender as an inherent property that is determined by sex. Simply put, males will be masculine in their behaviour and females feminine, and they will show such behaviour irrespective of context or other identity facets. By contrast, what has come to be known as social constructivist or discourse approach posits that biological sex and gender are not in a cause-effect relationship.

Gender identity is seen as an effect of behaviour, including language behaviour, that is culturally associated with masculinity or femininity. Rather than being stable and context-independent, therefore, gender can be enacted differently across situations and times. Such fluid gender identities are co-constructed in discourse, i.e. negotiated through social interaction, including language use.

Further, gender identities and their enactment are modelled on a hegemonic ideal (Connell 1995, Connell and Messerschmidt 2005) which speakers attempt to approximate or, less often, avoid. In short, while the three earlier approaches all assumed an interpretative stance of 'You are a man (woman) and therefore you talk like this', the contemporary approach interprets language use in terms of 'You talk like this and that makes you come across as masculine (feminine)'.

Gendered discourses, it was suggested, are simultaneously gendering. It should also be noted that text producers not only have the option to draw links between an originally neutral topic and notions of gender, a process which can be uncovered through content analysis. In addition, they can utilize language and conversation features to perform certain gendered styles in order to fulfill or defy expectations. With regard to metaphor, this leaves us with three ways in which it can be related to gender in discourse: Firstly, we can investigate if and how speakers and writers use metaphor in different ways according to their gender, and why they may do so. Secondly, we can look at examples of discourse on gender and see how metaphors are used to talk about men and women. And finally, we can abstract from the gender of speakers and those who they talk about and analyze how metaphor is employed to construct discourses and the social domains in which they originate as culturally feminine or masculine. Lakoff and Johnson's seminal work Metaphors We Live By (1980) first spelled out what has since become the standard in linguistic metaphor research, namely the conceptual theory of metaphor. The central idea is that metaphor is the cognitive process of 'understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another' [6, p. 5].

Of course, there are limits to how flexibly gendered language can be used, and it is indeed often the case that female or male speakers try to project, through their language use, ideals of femininity or masculinity, respectively. Rather than explaining this purely as an effect of their sex and concomitant socialisation, however, the discourse approach to language and gender allows for the possibility that speakers react to perceived expectations of 'ideal' gendered behaviour and that they may at times even do so consciously and strategically. It needs to be remembered that there are strong social pressures in place to patrol 'appropriate' language and other behaviour, ranging from ridicule and challenges to threats and physical violence.

Yet, one corollary of the discourse approach is that masculinity and femininity are linguistic resources that speakers of any sex can, albeit within different limits, use to project gender identities that they deem appropriate in the context, or to capitalize on positive cultural associations of particular genders.

When analyzing metaphorical nominations we rely on the cognitive theory of metaphor in which metaphor is defined as a cognitive process of understanding and interpreting various phenomena of reality through associative comparison of the phenomena of a conceptual field with that of another one.

Lexical metaphors are interpreted as representatives of conceptual metaphors that are cognitive schemes of correlation between source and target domains.

A conceptual metaphor is represented in a set of lexical metaphors created according to a single model that is characterized by a typical interrelation between direct meaning and figurative one.

In the totality of metaphorical nominations we contrast gender metaphors (gender-marked metaphors) with gender unmarked metaphors. Gender metaphors are viewed as nominations of men and women that serve as means of marking "typically feminine" and "typically masculine" qualities based on conformity to the phenomena of various conceptual categories (e.g. klusha (chicken) 'a stupid clumsy woman'; gorilla 'a large, strong, and brutal-looking man').

It may well be that the animal terms used as vocatives are more varied and subject to individual variation than those used as reference terms. The desired woman as a bird metaphor is also very productive in Spanish according to Samper's (1997) research. In the French language, metaphorical terms cross mapping crustaceans and sexuality are common. This characterization of the terms in question gives rise to the same sexual and social behavior being linguistically stigmatized for the female human being and rewarded for the male being. "Self-promotion" (making superiors aware of achievements) is an important "impression management" strategy to ensure career promotion. This process is part of the social capital theory which contends that career benefits result from the accumulation of relationships. Studies have shown it is less acceptable for women than men to promote and take credit for their workplace achievements and women can risk censure from colleagues "for fear they may be perceived as unfeminine, pushy, domineering and aggressive" .This theory links promotions to winning a series of progressively more selective competitions. Those who do not win early are eliminated or restricted to consolation rounds. The "Matthew Effect" was proposed by sociologist Merton (1968) to explain the career paths of scientists whereby early success leads to disproportionate advantages in career development and ongoing success, combining to produce steeper "career trajectories". The Matthew Effect seems appropriate to help explain the difference in career trajectories of women and men. "Sticky floor" is a metaphor with two interpretations. It was initially used in 1995 to describe how the careers of women in academic medicine were stalled due to a lack of institutional resources and support. More commonly, sticky floor is related to the theme that women self-sabotage their careers and are responsible for self-imposed barriers in workplaces. This pattern is obvious in a growing number of popular books written by women. Titles of these books make it clear that women have to supposedly make major changes in their career strategies and play the game like men. Some titles are: Play Like A Man, Win Like A Woman: What Men Know About Success That Women Need To Learn; Nice Girls Don't Get the Corner Office; Unconscious Mistakes Women Make That Sabotage Their Careers; It's Not A Glass Ceiling, It's A Sticky Floor: Free Yourself From The Hidden Behaviors Sabotaging Your Career Success. In sum, this paper has identified only three metaphors related to organizations that place responsibility on women for the gender imbalance in leadership: self-promotion, queen bee and bully broads. However, many popular books purporting to help women in their career advancement, espouse a common theme that women have placed self-imposed obstacles in their career pathways and these are often linked to the sticky floor metaphor. In contrast, this section showed that the majority of metaphors used in

the literature on women's career development are used to identify antecedents and consequences of discrimination and prejudice against women in the workforce. The application of the metaphor has been expanded to include not only mothers but all women's work overload and time scarcity In India, the nation with the world's highest number of working women, women are responsible for most household work and childcare. This second shift has been linked to high levels of depression, obesity and chronic illnesses in Indian women who work outside the home. In Australia, Craig analyzed data collected by the Australian Bureau of Statistics Time Use Survey from 4000 households and found strong evidence for working mothers having greater workloads than men [7, p. 156] Another frequently used metaphor, the "maternal wall", gives a clear image of how women's careers are negatively affected by the breaks in employment necessary for motherhood Barnett uses three different images to explain why it is commonly believed that women are suited for the home and not the workplace. [8, p. 20] Colleagues, both male and female, can view women who accept promotions as being derelict in their maternal responsibilities, encapsulated in the image of a woman being the "ideal homemaker" [9, p. 45] Conversely, the maternal wall can influence men into neglecting family leave as they might be seen as not fully committed to work and their dual role as breadwinner and "ideal worker" [9, p. 56]. Similarly, another stereotypical image initially appears to place women in a highly favorable light. This has been called the "women are wonderful effect" [8, p. 215]. Women are regarded as superior to men in areas such as friendliness and caring. However, such positive portrayals help reinforce attitudes that women are better than men in childcare and household work, and are thus less suited to leadership [8, p. 200]. There have been numerous studies that have looked at what is considered to be metaphorically masculine and feminine. Their study found that infants were able to relate items to a particular gender, such as fire hats, hammers, and bears being masculine. Research has also been done to show that the gender schema is not only developed in childhood but is present right across the lifespan (Eysenck 2004). Leinback, Hort, and Fagot (1997) hypothesized that as an individual acquires more gender related information, their gender schema and thus metaphorical gender reservoir will also increase. To test their hypothesis, Leinback, Hort, and Fagot (1997) developed the gender stereotyping test (GST) in which items were rated on a seven-point Leichart scale ranging from one (extremely masculine) to seven (extremely feminine). Their results supported their prediction, showing that as age increased, so did the proportion of gender stereotypic assignments. Results suggested that hammer, fire, square, rough, knife, angular, and blue were considered masculine objects or characteristics, while feminine items included pink, soft smooth, curved, the moon, and round. The authors noted in their discussion, however, that an object's attributes or characteristics may also have metaphorical aspects which could change the results. For example, a toy truck was seen as being more masculine and 'belonging' more to the male sex. However, this 'be-longingness' could be altered by associating the object with a second attribute or characteristic, such as if the truck had been pink.

This article has presented a wide range of topics: In terms of theory, it outlined language and gender research, conceptual metaphor theory and discourse analysis, while also covering issues in metaphor identification, including corpus linguistic methods. The guiding idea that links all these is that the function of metaphor in discourse is to construct reality from a particular vantage point, which in turn influences relationships between discourse participants. The particular focus was on how metaphor is linked to gendered realities, i.e. representations of the world in discourse that centre on notions and ideologies of masculinity and femininity. The results show that when referring to gender differences, appearance is of more importance than when describing a human, with no respect to gender. Thirdly, the comparison between gender-marked nominations of men and women reveals the prevalence of common features in the aspects of characteristics and the proportion inside the group alike. There is a large degree of distinctions in the totality of evaluative nominations.

References

1. Aristotle. Poetics. (Trans. W.H. Fyfe). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932.

2. Richards I.A. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. London: Oxford University Press. 1936.

3. Leinback M.D., & Fagot B.I. Categorical habituation to male and female faces: gender schematic processing in infancy. Infant behavior and development, 16, 1993: 317 - 332.

4. Bem S.L. Gender schema theory: a cognitive account of sex typing. Psychological Review. 1981; 88: 354 - 364.

5. Leinback M.D., Hort B.E., & Fagot B.I. Bears are for boys: metaphorical associations in young children's gender stereotypes. Cognitive development. 1997; 12: 107 - 130.

6. Lakoff G., and Johnson M. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1980.

7. Carly L.L. and Eagly A.H. Gender, hierarchy, and leadership: an introduction. Journal of Social Issues. 2001, Vol. 57: 629 - 636.

8. Crosby F.J., Williams J.C. and Barnett M. The maternal wall. Journal of Social Issues. 2004.

9. Barnett R.C., Rivers C. Same Difference: How Gender Myths Are Hurting Our Relationships, Our Children, and Our Jobs. Basic Books. New York, 2004.

Статья поступила в редакцию 04.04.18

УДК 82.0

Mazanaev Sh.A., Doctor of Sciences (Philology), senior lecturer, Professor, Dean of Department, Dagestan State University

(Makhachkala, Russia), E-mail: [email protected]

Mutalibova D.M., MA student, Philology Faculty, Dagestan State University (Makhachkala, Russia),

E-mail: [email protected]

HERO OF THE SERIES OF NOVELS BY BORIS AKUNIN "ADVENTURE OF ERAST FANDORIN" AS A NEW TYPE OF HERO IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE. The article discusses a problem of the appearance of a new type of hero in Russian literature on the example of the cycle of Boris Akunin's novels "The Adventure of Erast Fandorin". The image itself and the reasons that led to its appearance in contemporary Russian literature are analyzed. The materials of the article are modern literature, as well as the interview of Akunin to various sources. The term neo-romantic (modern interpretation of the heroes of the 19 th century novels) is considered. The authors conclude that this type of Russian literature replaced the character of postmodern works that were popular in the early 1990s. The researchers compare Fandorin with the heroes of the English detective novel and the heroes of the Russian psychological novel of the 19th century.

Key words: neoromantic, Boris Akunin, Adventures of Erast Fandorin, modern Russian literature, detective story, novel-adventure, analysis.

Ш.А. Мазанаев, д-р филол. наук, проф., декан филологического факультета, Дагестанский государственный

университета, E-mail: [email protected]

Д.М. Муталибова, студентка 2 курса магистратуры филологического факультета, Дагестанский

государственный университета (ДГУ), г. Махачкала, E-mail: [email protected]

ГЕРОЙ ЦИКЛА РОМАНОВ БОРИСА АКУНИНА «ПРИКЛЮЧЕНИЕ ЭРАСТА ФАНДОРИНА» КАК НОВЫЙ ТИП ГЕРОЯ В РУССКОЙ ЛИТЕРАТУРЕ

В статье рассмотрена проблема появление нового типа героя в русской литературе на примере цикла романов Бориса Акунина «Приключение Эраста Фандорина». Проанализирован сам образ и причины появления в современной русской литературе такого типа героя. Для разбора использованы материалы статьи исследователей современной литература, а также интервью самого Акунина разным источникам. Рассмотрен термин неоромантик (современная интерпретация героев романов 19 века). Авторы делают выводы, что такой тип в русской литературе появился на смену персонажем постмодернистских произведений, которые пользовались популярностью в начале 90-х годов. Произведены сравнения Фандорина с героями английского детективного романа и героями русского психологического романа 19 века.

Ключевые слова: неоромантик, Борис Акунин, Приключения Эраста Фандорина, современная русская литература, детектив, роман - авантюра, анализ.

Эраст Фандорин - это персонаж, вокруг которого всегда и везде разворачиваются невероятные и запутанные истории. Человек, жизнь которого калейдоскоп приключений, авантюр [1; 2].

Интересно проследить за судьбой героя. Эраст Петрович родился 8 января 1856 года в старинной дворянской семье. Мать героя умерла во время родов, а отец, Петр Исаакович, оплакивая любимую жену Елизавету, назвал новорождённого Эрастом, как героя известной сентиментальной повести Карамзина «Бедная Лиза».

Эраст Фандорин жил в достатке и получил блестящее образование и в совершенстве владел несколькими языками. Отец героя, в отличии от сына, был человеком крайне невезучим и кроме ничего огромных долгов сыну не оставил. Благодаря своему исключительному уму и образованию. Фандорин - младший сумел быстро разбогатеть и добиться положения в обществе.

Но и самый удачливый персонаж не застрахован от насмешек судьбы (или автора). Самым большим и единственным потрясением в жизни Эраста Петровича стала смерть его невесты, сразу после венчания (роман «Азазель»). Это привело к тому, что Фандорин приобретает две характерные черты - седые виски и легкое заикание вследствие контузии, полученной в финале романа во время взрыва на собственной свадьбе, устроенным многочисленными врагами.

С 1877 - 1878 года принимал участие в Русско-турецкой войне, С 1882 - 1891 года служил чиновником особых поручений при московском генерал-губернаторе. С 1891 по 1904 был в изгнании и проживал в Бристоли.

В 1905 году вернулся в Россию из-за Русско-японской войны уверенный, что Родине необходимы специалисты по Японии, а личные обиды при таких обстоятельствах лишние.

В 1914 году ведет охоту за опасным террористом-революционером по кличке Одиссей. В период Революции и Гражданской войны Фандорин успеет эвакуировать жену, беременную их единственным ребёнком (он окажется мальчиком и получит имя Александр) из охваченной пожаром братоубийственной войны России, сам же уедет из России, и дальнейшая его судьба останется для супруги неизвестной.

Эти факты биографии позволяют лучше понять и раскрыть черты нового типа героя в русской литературе [3].

Образ Фандорина принят много русскими исследователями как новый тип героя в русской литературе. После волны постмодернистских героев создал тип героя, черты которого схожи с романтическим героем и героем приключенческого романа. И это нам представляется новаторским изображением постмо-дернисткого героя.

Георгий Циплаков в своей статье «Зло возникающие в дороге и Дао Эраста Фандорина» считает, что Акунин вернулся таким образом к истокам [4.] События разворачиваются в 19 веке, да и сам герой имеет колоссальное отличие от героев современной литературы постмодернизма. Циплаков причисляет Акунина к так называемым неоромантикам, которые в отличии от романтиков смелее в изображении чувств не только своих положительных, но и отрицательных героев. Хотя Фандорина как романтического героя, полагает исследователь, моно рассмотреть в первой части цикла - «Азазель».

Создавая своего Эраста Фандорина, автор следовал принципам романтизма в описании внешности героя, мировоззрения, поступков и даже имени (отсылка к герою первого русского сентиментального романа «Бедная Лиза»).

Фандорин - крайне привлекательный внешне молодой человек: высокий рост, темные волосы, высокий лоб, блед-

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