Philological Sciences / 3.Theoretical and methodological problems in the language research.
Postgraduate Kresin I.A.
Belgorod State
University, Russia
Philosophical discourse as an object of study
in cognitive linguistics.
The study of the philosophical
discourse is especially relevant in light of recent developments in the field
of linguistics. The emergence and rapid development of the cognitive school at the present
stage is, for sure, a
significant characteristic of the linguistics theory in the 21. century. Having taken its place in the paradigm of the language sciences, cognitive linguistics has its own set of key
terms and the tools which allow to bring the study of the philosophical discourse to a new
level, never
reached before.
The
basic term of cognitive linguistics
is the concept . Unlike lexemes that make up the plan of linguistic expression, the term
“concept” refers to the plan of contents. As
such, the concept can be understood as an object of the mental reality, which has a name and
reflects a certain culturally determined idea about the world [5]. In other
words, the picture of the world forms the concepts in the collective
consciousness of the people.
At the same time philosophy, as a particular area of
human culture, touches the deep ideological levels and comprehends the reality
in a particular way and as such is capable of forming concepts based on the author's
world vision. Considering of various world views, fixing the attention on the
fundamental issues of epistemology and ontology and then the formation of new
concepts - is not only a methodological way but the content of philosophical discourse. While forming concepts, based on
his own thoughts and ideas about the world and putting these concepts into
words, an author creates a text
that has unique characteristics, which becomes a very interesting object of
linguistic research.
Some
of these characteristics, that distinguish the philosophical discourse from
other types of language activities, we will give below.
One of the aspects of philosophical texts is a frequent production of neologisms
- artificial terms. So, in the texts of G.W. F. Hegel we can find such new constructions as «Für-sich-sein» -
being for itself, «Sein-für-eines"
- being for
one thing, «An-und-für-sich-
sein "- being in and for itself. In the "Phenomenology of Spirit" we can see following
terms: «Außer-sich-sein"
- being out of itself,
"Für-das-Bewußtsein-sein" - being for consciousness [1,
2].
We can give a large number of examples of
this derivation, which make sense only in the context of the Hegelian
philosophy.
In
the work of Martin Heidegger "Being and Time", we also find a lot of
this kind of lexical units. In particular, these are «In-der-Welt-Sein" - being in the world, «Mit- und
Selbstsein" - with- and self-existence, «In-sein" - in-being, «Dingwirklichkeit" - the
reality of
things [3].
The
formation of new terms in philosophy is conditioned not only by the need of the author
in a more accurate transfer of appropriate information, but rather we deal
with a
powerful influence on the text of a super-phrasal unity given by the form of the subject-object and subject-subject
relationship in the philosopher's thinking process [6].
Giving
special meanings
to the
lexical units of the natural language is
another feature of the philosophical
discourse. For
example, the lexeme “Sorge” has in the
everyday
German the
meaning "care",
"concern". This lexeme becomes in the Martin Heidegger's philosophy a much broader term. There, as noted by V.I. Krasikov, Sorge
“contains shades of almost
all human manifestations: attention, interest, desire, love, hatred, anxiety,
fear, duty, guilt, and more” [4, p.109].
The
high degree of abstraction of the lexical units is the next feature of the philosophical discourse.
Determining the exact composition of
the concepts behind the lexemes is quite challenging. Articles in the philosophical dictionaries describe usually only partially the
significance of a particular lexeme, reducing this description to an analysis of the philosophical
systems of various authors. With the help of special software, we could calculate the number of
occurrences of different lexemes by different authors. Here we will only mention that in the Kant's works the following lexemes with the abstract sense were
used more
than a thousand times: “Begriff” (concept), “Erscheinung” (phenomenon), “Vernunft”
(reason), “Tranzendenz”
(transcendence). In the works of G.W. F. Hegel the most frequent lexical units are - “Begriff“ (concept),
“Bestimmung” (definition), “Unmittelbarkeit” (directness) “Bewusstsein”
(consciousness), “Einheit” (unity) and others. The use of abstract lexemes indicates a significant number
of complex concepts in the mind of philosophers.
All given features of philosophical texts touch different levels of the
language and allow us to conclude that, despite the similarity of the basic
principles of the discursive
philosophical text deployment with the general principles of the generation of
any scientific work, we are indeed dealing with a unique linguistic phenomenon, which is very interesting to study from
the perspective of cognitive linguistics.
References
1. Hegel G. W. F. Wissenschaft der Logik. Werke.
Zweite Auflage. Bande III, IV, V // Verlag von
Duncker & Humblot, Berlin, 1841.
630 S.
2. Hegel G. W. F. Phaenomenologie des Gestes // Gesamtherstellung: Reclam, Ditzingen,
Stuttgart, 1987. 595 S.
3. Heidegger M. Sein und Zeit // Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tuebingen, 2001. 444 S.
4. Krasikov V.I. Being and
Time: existentialism versus anthropology // Tomsk State University, Tomsk, 2013. P. 108-116.
5. Wierzbickaya A. Language. Culture.
Cognition. // Eng. dictionaries, Moscow, 1997. 416 p.
6. Varnavskaya O.O., Khusainova E.N. Features of the formation of new terms in the classical philosophical texts // Language. Discourse. Text: II International Scientific Conference: RSU, 2005. P. 54-56.