Language, culture and the anthropocentric paradigm

Abstract

Current state-of-the-art of human science, on one hand and objective conditions of the changed world, on the other, inevitably require reinterpretation of both well-known and currently topical problems, that is why a sharp increase of interest in such directions forming a part of anthropocentric paradigm, as ethnopsycholinguistics, linguoculturology, cognitive linguistics, speech act theory, intercultural communication etc. is no accident. Discussion of language as a cultural code of a nation, and not only as an instrument of communication and cognition has become one of the top-priority directions of linguistics, since thanks to language we can access not only the world of modern consciousness of a nation, but reveal visions of the world, society and even a human, deposited in its deep layers. As is known, one can still find in the language material the echoes of the past epochs which survive centuries. In other words, language is a main source, by means of which a human recognizes the major part of information about the world. Since a human is living in the world of concepts created by him for intellectual, spiritual and social needs, in which subjects and things are less important compared to them, the human’s success in the society depends on how proficient he is in a speech, at that not so much from the viewpoint of speech culture, as the ability of penetration deep into language secrets. The idea of language anthropocentrism has become generally accepted nowadays and language factor has a great importance in formation of visions of human. On of the fundamental postulates of a new paradigm is L. Wittgenstein’s thesis: “The world is a unity of facts and not things”. Language has been gradually reoriented on facts, phenomena, while a native-speaker’s personality (“linguistic persona” according to I.N. Karaulov’s terminology) has become the focus of interest, subject designing methods have changed, the approach to selection of general principles and methods of study itself has underwent transformation; several competitive meta-languages of linguistic description have appeared and as V.A. Maslova mentions: “Formation of anthropocentric paradigm lead us to a turn of linguistic problematics to human and its place in culture, since a linguistic persona with its entire diversity became a focus of attention of culture and cultural traditions. Self – physical, self – social, self – intellectual, self – emotional, self – speaking and thinking… Influence on any substance of the personality makes it possible to have an effect on any other side of the addressee’s personality. Thus, a linguistic persona enters into communication as a person with many aspects, and it corresponds to strategies and tactics of speech communication, social and psychological roles of communicants, and cultural importance of information included in communication” (1, p. 15).

Bringing of a human to the fore by anthropocentric paradigm at the same time is based on recognition of language as a main designing characteristic of a human. While entrenching in all thinking processes, the language creates new mental spaces and brings a human beyond the direct observation. Language expresses the train of human thought, creates possible worlds, imprints in itself the thought dynamics and ways of its presenting by verbal means.