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175проелемы современного осрпзоопнип
F.G. Fatkullina
TYPOLOGY OF CONCEPTS IN MODERN LINGUISTICS
Keywords: concept, lingvocognitive, cultural studies, structure, typology, the national language, the mental unit.
Abstract: The Article is devoted to defining the typology of concepts in modern linguistics. The various points of view on this issue, deals with the most famous classification, the definition of basic concepts: "concept", "conceptual sphere", "the mental unit. The article aims at describing and presenting of such a complex unit mentality as a concept. The object of the study is discussed in its various manifestations and identified combining verbal and non-verbal means of expression information in the conceptual sphere.
Ключевые слова: концепт, когнитивная лингвистика, лингвокультурология, структура, типология, национальный язык, единица ментальности.
Аннотация: Статья посвящена определению типологии концептов в современной лингвистике. Приводятся различные точки зрения по данной проблеме, описываются наиболее известные классификации, раскрывается значение основных терминов лингвокультурологии: «концепт», «концептосфера», «единица ментальности». Концепт рассматривается как оперативная единица памяти, ментального лексикона, отражающий специфические культурно-обусловленные представления человека о действительности.
The first time the term "concept" was used by S.A. Askoldov-Alexeyev in 1928. The scientist defined concept as a mental formation which substitutes an indefinite number of subjects, actions, and mental functions of one and the same origin in the process of thinking (concepts "plant", "justice", mathematic concepts"). "The question of the nature of the general terms or co n-cepts (according to the medieval terminology they are called universals) is an old question which is on the waiting list but it is not almost touched upon its central point. The general notion as the content of the consciousness act is still rather enigmatic magnitude... and the nature of the concepts is still rather enigmatic" [1]. These words were said more than eighty years ago but they are still urgent.
In modern linguistics great importance is given to the examination of the nature of concept and during this we face the recognition of the existence of a row of various points of view.
The term "concept" "became a part of the conceptual apparatus of the cognitive science, semantics, and lingvoculturology. The term consolidation in science is connected with certain diffusiveness of boundaries, arbitrariness of its usage, and its confusion with the terms with close meanings and/ or close language forms [9:75].
In the contemporary researches the analysis of the term "concept" is carried on in two directions:
1. According to the gnosiology of concept (from the point of view of the concept origin and its "location" and also its correlation with reality and forms of its display).
2. According to the typology of concept (from the point of view of a certain science (discipline) with the account of its conceptual apparatus and its need for this term) [13: 17].
Concerning the first direction, all points of view on this definition of "concept" in scientific literature can be combined in the following:
• concept is the content of the notion which accretes the volume gradually developing and updating different semantic features in the speech (narrow understanding);
• concept "expresses" connotations of the "national color", functions of the language as a means of thinking and communicating (wide understanding)
Typology of concepts as mental formations may be carried on the basis of their standardization (individual, group and national). On the basis of content they can be divided into conceptions, schemes, notions, frames etc. On the basis of language expression concepts may be represented by lexemes, phrase combinations, free words combinations, syntactic constructions, and even by texts and sets of texts (Z.D. Popova). "Concept is examined as a nexus between thinking and language; as a unit of consciousness and an information structure which reflects the human experience" (E.C. Kubryakova); as an intentional function from the possible world to its objects"
(R.I. Pavilyonis); as a basic perceptive-cognitive-affective formation of dynamic character which functions spontaneously in cognitive and communicative activity of an individual and which subordinates to regularity of mental life of a person" (A.A. Zalevskaya); as a "complex mental unit which turns different sides during the process of mental activity updating... its equal features and layers" (I.A. Sernin); "a unit of language thought" (T.A. Fesenko); any discrete unit of collective mind, which relicts the object of the real or ideal world and is kept in the national memory of the language speakers as a cognized verbal denoted substratum" (A.P. Babushkin); "knowledge about the object from the "Reality" world and converted into the knowledge of the "Ideal" world" (A. Vezhbitskaya), etc. [13: 18-19].
Concept is a mental unit, an element of the mind. The human mind is a mediator between the real world and language. Cultural information comes to mind, filters there, overworks, and systematizes: "Concepts form "some kind of cultural layer which mediates between the person and the world" [Arutyunova 1993: 3]; concept is "something like a clot of culture in a human mind; ... something by means of which a person. himself enters the culture."; concepts exist in the human mind (in the mental world) in the forms of "bundles" of notions, knowledge, associations, and emotional experience; concepts are both conceived and are also experienced" [15: 40, 42].
The term "conceptosphere" was introduced to the scientific use by D.S. Likhachyov basing on the type of B.Y.Vernadskiy's terms: noosphere, biosphere etc. Conceptosphere is a pure mental sphere, which consists of concepts, which in their turn exit in the form of mental pictures, schemes, notions, frames, scripts, gestalts (more or less complicated complex images of the outer space), abstract essences which generalize various features of outer space. Conceptosphere also owns cognitive classifiers which favor a definite and thorough flexible structure of the conceptosphere [12: 61-62].
According to D.S. Likhachyov "the richer the culture of the nation, the richer conceptosphere of the national language. there are a lot of separate variants of conceptosphere of the national language, they are grouped differently and they reveal themselves differently." [11: 5,9].
Concerning the concept as a fact of culture, Y.S. Stepanov singles out three components or three "layers" of concept:
1) the basic, urgent feature;
2) one or several additional, "passive" features which are no longer urgent, "historical";
3) internal form which is usually unconscious and imprinted in the outer, word form [15:
46-54 ].
Concepts exist differently in different layers and in these layers they are differently real for people of the given culture. Besides, concepts are realized differently in different cultures, that is why it is competent to consider, for example, the display of the concepts "family", "marriage", "wife" in the Russian culture, Tatar, and English cultures etc.
Comparing the concepts peculiar to different national cultures the researcher faces the asymmetrical representation of units [16: 134]. The extreme degree of the asymmetrical representation of units is a lacunarity, i.e. an absence of definite features and units in one system in comparison with the other one, figuratively speaking, these are so called "unfilled gaps" in some matrix which can relatively be divided to the following varieties: 1) absent in the comparing cultures of the objects comprehension, illogisms, which were not caused by the needs of people but may be invented or created [5]: "stoun-eater", "heffalump" etc.; 2) absent in one of the cultures of actuals comprehension peculiar to the other culture (object, anthroponomical, historical, and cultural): "kokoshnik", shilling", Komsomol meeting"; 3) irrelevant for one of the cultures qualities which have a certain name in the culture to which it is urgent: fair play means playing by the rules in the English lingvoculture; generosity is a specific quality of the Russian national character. It would be
проелемы современного осрпзоопнип
incorrect to talk about lacunarity as of the object absence in the last case, as the lingvocultural specifics occurs here.
Ethnospecific quality is the peculiar quality which is concerned as a separate one. I.E. Anichkov stated that everything is idiomatic in the language [2]. In this condition V.M. Savitskiy's conception concerning the linguistic continuum and the degree of idiomaticity of his or that language unit is rather interesting to us [14]. Thus, three types of concepts can be singled out: 1) specialized ethnocultural and sociocultural concepts which express the peculiarities of the respective culture; 2) unspecialized concepts, cultural specifics of which is expressed implicitly and demands cultural association searches; 3) universal concepts which don't have cultural specifics.
Let's examine what "concept" includes. S.G. Vorkachev singles out the following components:
1) all the communicative-significant information, its paradigmatic, syntagmatic and word-forming connections,
2) all pragmatic information of the language sign,
3) cognitive memory of the word, i.e. the semantic characteristics of the language sign connected with its initial destination and with the system of spiritual values of the language (i.e. cultural and ethnical component which reflects the linguistic picture of the world of its informants) [7: 66-70].
In whole, in the wide sense, concepts include lexemes, the meanings of which form the content of the national language mind and also form a "naïve picture of the world" of the informants. In the narrow sense, concepts include semantic formations which characterize the bearers of a certain culture and, the key for understanding the national mentality, the list of which is limited. Such metaphysical concepts as soul, truth, liberty, happiness, love (mental essences of high degree of abstractness) in different languages have different symbols, i.e. the sign which presupposes the use of its figurative object content for the expression of the abstract content.
Concept may be verbalized by separate words and word combinations, phraseological units, sentences and texts. Expression of a concrete concept, connecting a stable sensory image with the meaning of a separate word which stirs up the given image, is enough, but in the complication of the expressed meanings whole word combinations and sentences are used. Often one and the same concepts may be expressed by different language means. Some concepts are expressed with the help of the whole text or a row of works of one or several authors, as they demand comprehension of a great quantity of situations which reflect the interconnected aspects of such concepts.
Verbalization is provided mainly at the lexical and phraseological levels. The lexical level objectifies the reality phenomena by absolutely different nominative techniques. Lexical content of the language "directly" reflects the fragments of extralinguistic reality and the researches of the language vocabulary arise to be technological.
Concepts have the following structure: etymological layer and urgent layer (y.S. Stepanov); the nucleus and periphery (Z.D. Popova and others).
The following refers to the organizational and structural types: mental picture, concept-scheme, concept-frame, concept-insight, concept-scenario, kaleidoscopic (A.P. Babushkin, Z.D. Popova and others); concept-minimum and concept-maximum (A. Vezhbitskaya); micro- and macroconcept; superconcept; individual, microgroup, macrogroup, national, civil, universal (G.G. Slyishkin, V.I. Karasik); ethnocultural and sociocultural (G.G. Slyishkin); names, uniques and universals; archetype and invariant (S.T.Vorkachev).
The following refers to the substantial types of a concept:
• cultural concept (S.T.Vorkachev, V.I. Karasik, T.V. Matveyeva);
• lingvocultural concept (V.I. Karasik, N.V. Rappoport);
• cognitive concept (E.S. Kubryakova, Z.D. Popova, S.T.Vorkachev);
• emotional concept (A. Vezhbitskaya);
• scientific concept (T.V. Matveyeva) [13: 19-22].
On the basis of the presented classification of the substantial and structural elements it is easy to draw a conclusion that the understanding of the concept by different authors of the latest decade doesn't come to any unity [16].
Lingvocognitive and lingvocultural approaches to the understanding of the concept are not incompatible: concept as a mental formation in the human mind is the entrance to the conceptosphere of the society, and finally, to the culture. The concept as a unit of culture is a fixation of the collective experience, which becomes the property of the individual. In other words, these approaches differ by the vectors in relation to the individual: lingvocognitive concept is the direction from the individual mind to the culture and lingvocultural concept is the direction from the culture to the individual mind. This difference is comparable to the generative and interpretative models of communication, "at the same time, we understand that the differentiation of the motion outside and the motion inside is the researchers' hook and in reality the motion is an integral and multidimensional process" [9: 117; 16: 58].
Having summarized the researchers' points of view to the understanding of the concept, we can make the conclusion that in the frames of lingvocultural approach concept is a multidimensional mental formation which includes the value, conceptual and figurative elements. The difference of the cultural aspect from the others which are applied in the modern science of conditional mental units is that the primacy of the value relation to the imaging object is typical for the concept, though it is multidimensional. Concept formation is the process of generalization of the results of the experimental cognition of reality to the limits of the human memory and their correlation with the earlier learned value dominants which are expressed in religion, ideology, art etc. Concept functioning is the process of choice and use of concrete language means which according to the message sender's opinion are able to make this concept in the addressee's mind more active. Thus, concept exists in mind; it is determined by the culture and is objectified in the language.
References
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