Kharkiv linguistic school. Heritage. Alexander Potebnja

Abstract

The article focuses on the scientific heritage of Alexander Potebnja as one of the founders of Kharkiv linguistic school. Potebnja’s seminal books and articles that among many other issues address language origin, human consciousness, and semantics of linguistic units are considered as milestones in the development of state-of-the-art humanities. The article reads his three tenets in terms of philosophy of language and cognitive linguistics. The first tenet concerns correlation between language and thought as a way of accounting for language origin and linguistic abilities of the human. The latter that uses language to communicate his world perceptive experience is ascribed a two-facet nature as both an individual and a nation. This tenet is viewed as one anticipating the underpinning principles of cognitive linguistics and theory of the national construal of the world. The second tenet concerns mental evolution of humanity. Potebnja sees it as a contiguity of image and meaning that diverge evolving in myth, poetry and prose. This tenet is considered as an anticipation of Popper’s Evolutionary Epistemology and Westman’s theory of the ontogenesis of the psyche. The third Potebnja’s tenet focuses on the symbolism of linguistic units. The exclamation and the word are juxtaposed in terms of their internal and external forms. The word and the exclamation are analyzed as signs that render meaning by way of, correspondingly, either indicating to it or symbolizing it. These features suggest conceptual parallelism with Pierce’s semiotic trichotomy of icon, index and symbol.