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53THE LINGUISTIC AND CONCEPTUAL PICTURE OF THE
WORLD
Mukhtorova B.A.
PhD student of Ferghana State University Ferghana city, Uzbekistan https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7581478
Abstract. The article under discussion depicts the linguistic and conceptual picture of the world. The problem of studying the linguistic picture of the world is closely connected with the problem of the conceptual picture of the world which reflects the specificity of man and his being, his relationship with the world, the conditions of his existence. The author of the article considers that the linguistic picture of the world of a person reflects the general picture of the world.
Keywords: linguistic, conceptual, picture of the world, image, verbal conceptualization, language, perception, ethnolinguistics, concept.
Introduction
A human being as a subject of cognition is a bearer of a certain system of knowledge, ideas and opinions about objective reality. This system in different sciences has its name - the picture of the world (or the conceptual system of the world, model of the world, image of the world) and is considered in different aspects.
Main part
The linguistic picture of the world is an image of consciousness-reality reflected by means of the language, a model of integral knowledge of the conceptual system of representations represented by language. The linguistic picture of the world is usually distinguished from the conceptual or cognitive model of the world, which is the basis of language embodiment, verbal conceptualization of human knowledge about the world [4: 46].
The linguistic picture of the world is also commonly interpreted as a reflection of everyday, commonplace ideas about the world. The idea of the linguistic model of the world is the following: every natural language reflects a certain way of perception of the world, imposed as obligatory for all native speakers. Y.D. Apresyan calls the language picture of the world naive in the sense that scientific definitions and language interpretations do not always coincide in volume and even in content [1: 357]. The conceptual picture of the world or "model" of the world, unlike linguistic picture, constantly changes, reflecting results of the cognitive and social activity, but separate fragments of the linguistic picture of the world still for a long time preserve surviving, relic ideas of people about the universe.
Among the wide range of opinions about the essence of the concept of the linguistic picture of the world, the fact that the linguistic division of the world is different in different nations remains indisputable. In the process of activity in the human mind there is a subjective reflection of the existing world. A person learns language the same way as the surrounding reality; thus along with the logical (conceptual) picture of the world there is a linguistic one, which does not contradict logical, but also is not identical to it.
The notion of the language as an image of the world goes back to Plato's "Kratilus", to Humboldt's doctrine of the inner form of a word, to the comparativist cultural and philological studies of M. Muller, to the theories of Neo-Humboldtians (the founder of this school L. Weisberger introduced the concept of "the linguistic picture of the world"), to the works of E.
Sepir and B. Uorf. E. Sepir's works paved the way for the creation of ethnolinguistics. E. Sepir believes that language is becoming increasingly valuable as a guiding principle in the study of culture. In a sense, the system of cultural patterns of a particular civilization is fixed in the language that expresses that civilization and that to a large extent a human being is at the mercy of a particular language, which is the means of expression in a given society. It is quite wrong to believe that man navigates reality without the aid of language, and that language is merely an accidental means of solving specific problems of communication and thought. Evidence shows that the "real world" is largely unconsciously built on the linguistic norms of a given society [10: 261].
E. Sepir cites the idea that it is not the diverse objective reality that is expressed in people's thinking by the same logical categories, but that different linguistic forms divide this objective reality in different ways. "No two languages are so identical that they can be regarded as expressing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are separate worlds, not one world using different labels" [10: 261].
E. Sepir and his follower B. Uorf developed the hypothesis known as the "Sepir-Worf hypothesis" which forms the theoretical core of ethnolinguistics. According to this theory, the difference in norms of thinking determines the difference in norms of behavior in cultural-historical interpretation. Comparing Hopi language with the "Middle European standard," Uorf seeks to prove that even the basic categories of substance, space, time can be interpreted differently depending on the structure of the qualities of language: "... the concepts of 'time' and 'matter' are not given from experience to all people in the same form. They depend on the nature of the language or languages through the use of which they have developed" [11: 279]. He wrote that people dissect nature in the direction suggested by their native language and the world appears as a kaleidoscopic stream of impressions which must be organized by their consciousness, which means mainly by the language system stored in their minds. The world is dismembered, organized into concepts, and people allocate meanings in this way and not otherwise, mainly because they are parties to the agreement that prescribes such systematization. This agreement is valid for a certain speech collective and is anchored in the system of models of their language.
The notion of the language as an image of the world finally took shape in the concepts of the authors of the Vienna Logical Circle, in particular that "factory of thought" that is commonly referred to as analytical philosophy.
Many linguists, including A. Vezbitskaya, N.D. Arutyunova, G.A. Brutyan, S.A. Vasiliev, G.V. Kolshansky, M. Black, D.Himes and others are engaged in the problems of reflection in the linguistic picture of the world.
O.G. Pocheptsov calls the way the world is represented as the linguistic mentality: "The relation between some part of the world and its linguistic representation can be defined as the linguistic mentality" [9: 11]. The world, in the definition of the linguistic mentality, is not only the world surrounding man, but also the world created by man and often in most of its volume ceases to exist when its creator and carrier - man - disappears, i.e. the world of man's speech actions and his states.
The concept of a picture of the world (including the linguistic one) is based on the study of man's ideas about the world. If the world is a person and the environment in their interaction, a picture of the world is the result of processing information about the environment and the person. Thus, representatives of the cognitive linguistics rightly argue that our conceptual system,
displayed in the form of the linguistic picture of the world, depends on physical and cultural experience and is directly connected with it. The phenomena and objects of the external world are presented in the human consciousness in the form of an internal image. The system of images forms the picture of the world.
M. Heidegger points out that an essentially understood picture of the world does not mean a picture depicting the world, but the world understood as a picture. There is a complex relationship between a picture of the world as a reflection of the real world and the linguistic picture of the world as a fixation of this reflection. The picture of the world can be presented by means of spatial (up-down, right-left, east-west, far-near), temporal (day-night, winter-summer), quantitative, ethical and other parameters. Its formation is influenced by language, tradition, nature and landscape, upbringing, education, and other social factors.
A picture of the world is not a simple set of "photographs" of objects, processes, properties, etc., for it includes not only reflected objects, but also the position of the reflecting subject, his attitude toward these objects, and the subject's position is the same reality as the objects themselves. The system of socio-typical positions, relations, evaluations is reflected in the system of the national language and takes part in the construction of the linguistic picture of the world.
The linguistic picture of the world is a set of ideas about the world, a certain way of conceptualizing reality, historically formed in the minds of a given linguistic community and reflected in the language.
The term "the linguistic picture of the world" according to V.A. Maslova is nothing more than a metaphor, because in reality, the specific features of the national language, which records the unique socio-historical experience of a particular national community of people, creates for speakers of this language not a different, unique picture of the world, different from the objectively existing, but only a specific coloring of the world due to the national importance of objects, phenomena, processes, selective attitude to them, which is generated by the specific activities of the language [5].
R.I. Pavilyonis used the concept "conceptual system" to designate the conceptual picture of the world. The conceptual system is formed in the process of mastering by an individual of the world, the national spiritual activity of people finds its reflection in it. Means of detection of the contents of the conceptual system is language which fixes the specific knowledge, characteristic for the given community.
The component of the conceptual system, reflecting its national specificity, is a concept (meaning) - the cognitive structure which is a result of reflection of a reality fragment. Various contents are fixed in a concept: conceptual, verbal, associative, culturological, etc. Therefore, cross-lingual comparison of concepts promotes revealing of national and international components in the content of the conceptual system of native speakers of different languages. The mental difference is determined by the presence of specific national concepts included in culture [7: 286].
S.I. Drachyova considers the national specificity of the conceptual picture of the world. Due to the universality of ways of cognition of the surrounding world, the content of the conceptual component in different languages will have a great similarity. Besides, as a whole nuclear components of multicultural concepts mostly coincide, the national specificity is shown on peripheral sites and in culturological component of a concept [2: 60-64].
For this reason the concept is chosen as basic at revealing of features of representation of knowledge of various languages speakers and speakers of two languages (bilinguals). Revealing of national specificity of fragments of the conceptual system which depends on specificity of activity of its bearers, cultural, geographical, etc., is carried out on the basis of the analysis of some concepts.
The national uniqueness of the conceptual system is shown also in the presence of those or other concepts entering into culture. The totality of such concepts defines specificity of mentality, and therefore revealing of them is extremely important not only for understanding of features of speech generation, but also for revealing of specificity of semantic formation that allows using the received data in sociology, political science (ethnic conflictology).
At inter-lingual comparison of concepts in their structure the steady relation of universal and idio-ethnic components is revealed, thus the conceptual component of the concept, correlated by speakers of different languages with the same fragment of reality has universal character and the national-cultural specificity is shown in other components.
Analyzing R.I. Pavilyonis' theory of the conceptual system, V.A. Pischalnikova notes that a concept includes both psychological meaning and personal meaning. [8: 15]. The core of this formation is a concept, i.e. generalization of objects of some class according to their specific features. The existence of the intersubjective part in each component of the concept provides the possibility of communication between carriers of different conceptual systems.
"Values of words and other meaningful units of language learned by the subject are included in the corresponding concept of the system as one of its components and are capable along with other components of a concept (visual, aural, etc.) to represent a concept as a whole. Therefore perception of a language sign actualizes the subjective figurative, conceptual, emotional information containing in a concept, and on the contrary, any kind of such information can be associated with a sign" [7: 380]. Meaning is understood as a formative consciousness that combines "visual, tactile, auditory, gustatory, verbal, and other possible characteristics of an object" [8: 12].
Thus, a conceptual picture of the world is a system of information about objects, actual and potential represented in various cognitive, practical activity of an individual. The unit of information of such system is the concept which function consists in fixation and actualization of conceptual, emotional, associative, verbal, culturological and other content of objects of reality included in the structure of the conceptual picture of the world.
The problem of understanding should be considered first of all as a problem of understanding of the world by the subject on the basis of his conceptual picture of the world, which is objectified and represented in his activity.
As noted above, the perception of the world around partly depends on the cultural and national characteristics of speakers of a particular language. Therefore, from the point of view of ethnology, linguocultural studies and other related fields it is most interesting to establish the reasons for the differences in the linguistic pictures of the world, and these differences do exist. The solution of such a question is to go beyond linguistics and deepen into the mysteries of other peoples' knowledge of the world. There are a huge number of reasons for such differences, but only a few of them seem visible, and therefore the main ones. There are the most important three factors or causes of linguistic differences: nature, culture and cognition. Let us consider these factors.
The first factor is nature. Nature is, first of all, the external conditions of people's life, which are reflected in different ways in languages. Man gives names to those animals, places, plants that he knows, to that state of nature which he feels. Natural conditions dictate to human linguistic consciousness peculiarities of perception, even such phenomena as color perception. The designation of varieties of color is often motivated by semantic features of visual perception of objects of surrounding nature. A particular natural object is associated with a particular color. Different linguistic cultures have their own associations connected with color designations, which coincide in some respects, but differ from each other in some respects [1: 351].
It is nature, in which a person exists, that initially forms his/her world of associative representations in the language, which are reflected in the language by metaphorical transfers of meanings, comparisons, connotations.
The second factor is culture. "Culture is something that a person has not received from the natural world, but has introduced, made, created himself1' [4: 51]. The results of material and spiritual activity, socio-historical, aesthetic, moral and other norms and values that distinguish different generations and social communities are embodied in different conceptual and linguistic perceptions of the world. Any feature of the cultural sphere is fixed in the language. Also linguistic differences can be conditioned by the national rituals, customs, traditions, folklore and mythological representations, symbolism. Cultural models conceptualized in certain names spread around the world and become known even to those who are not familiar with the culture of this or that nation.
As for the third factor, cognition, it should be said that rational, sensual, and spiritual ways of perceiving the world differ for each person. The ways of realization of the world are not identical for different people and different nations. It is proved by the differences in the results of the cognitive activity, which find their expression in the specificity of language perceptions and peculiarities of language consciousness of different peoples. An important indicator of the influence of cognition on linguistic differences is what W. von Humboldt called "different ways of seeing things" [3: 156-158].
It is necessary to take into account that perception of this or that situation, this or that object is in direct dependence also from the subject of perception, from his background knowledge, experience, expectations, from where he himself is located what is directly in his field of vision. This, in its turn, makes it possible to describe one and the same situation from different points of view, perspectives, which undoubtedly expands ideas about it. No matter how subjective the process of "constructing the world" is, it nevertheless implies taking into account the most various objective aspects of the situation, the real state of affairs in the world; the result of this process is the creation of a "subjective image of the objective world".
Conclusion
As we can see, there are many interpretations of the concept "the linguistic picture of the world". This is due to the existing discrepancies in the world pictures of different languages, as the perception of the world depends on the cultural and national characteristics of speakers of a particular language. Each picture of the world defines its own vision of language, That is why it is very important to distinguish between the concepts of "the conceptual picture of the world" and "linguistic picture of the world".
Thus, we can state that at the modern stage of the linguistics development, linguistic models of the world become the object of description and interpretation within the complex of
human sciences. The picture of the world of any language is considered not only in the context of
folklore, mythology, culture, history, customs and psychology of a given people, but also in the
context of linguistics.
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