Language in semiotic hierarchy of culture

Abstract

In his monograph, the author discusses a range of topical issues, all of them subsumed under the category of relationships between language and culture. The main thrust of his approach is establishing and analysing peculiarities of language considered from a semiotic-functional viewpoint, that is, when operating as a basic variety of worldview model, that is, as a primary semiotic system, on one hand, and on the other, and simultaneously, as a base (or as de Saussure’s expression plane) of secondary semiotic systems, such as folklore, religion, politics, business, advertising, and literature. In this, he pays special attention to linguistic and semiotic aspects of the interaction of linguistic-cultural codes through the interference of communicative-functional varieties of discourse realizing these secondary sign systems as their speech / textual correlates. Importantly, in his treatment of instances of such interference, he takes into account the influence of a larger historical (cultural as well as social) context in which they occur. The monograph consists of the four chapters. In the first (“Linguistic semiotics, its issues and goals”), he analyses problems of linguistic semiotics theory (its history as well as its current state-of-art) as seem from a socio-cultural viewpoint. In the second (II. “The development of human perceptual environment: (persona loquens — persona percipiens — persona cognoscens)”), he develops his conception of communicative situation as a worldview model, concentrating especially on deixis, grammatical as well as pronominal. Aslo, regarding the linguistic interpretation of thermal processes and features as proceeding from human’s natural environment to human himself and his culture, he analyses the semiotic-modelling properties of lexemes denoting the latter as used within phraseological items. The third chapter (III. “Interaction of linguistic-cultural codes: linguistic-semiotic contacts and borrowing resulting thereof”) deals with specific instances of the interference of linguistic-cultural codes, such as interaction of grammar and mythology in calendar proverbs, the coexistence of mythic-poetic symbolism and communist ideology in Ukrainian Soviet sensational prose, authoritative properties of Church Slavonic lexical items operating in Russian socio-cultural discourse, para- and extrascientific derivatives of lexicographical discourse, the interaction of administrative-ideological discourse and urban vernacular, the political in-/correctness in the use of the Plural, and some others. In the fourth chapter (IV. “The language of proper names: onomasticon as a secondary and ternary semiotic system”), he starts by investigating the specificity of proper names emerging in the discourse of business and commerce, and then proceeds to the comprehensice treatment of theoretical and methodological issues arising in the analysis of deonomastic derivation, also taking into consideration properties of poem titles determined by their double nature of both a poetical text’s name and ab integral part of this text. The target readership of the monograph is philologists – specialists in linguistics, literary studies, ethnography and folklore studies, as well as culturologists, specialists in advertising and naming, political scientists, all those who are interested in the problems of the existence and operation of language in a broad socio-cultural context, the role of language in mechanisms of culture and its essence as such a mechanism.