Language, consciousness and culture: some suggestions to develop further the Moscow school of psycholinguistics

Conclusion

psycholinguistic language consciousness culture

As Sweetser [46] states: `it should not be a controversial claim that relationships between linguistic form and function reflect human conceptual structure and general principles of cognitive organisation'. She goes on to remind us that in order to understand metaphor, we must give up old prejudices. We can no longer insist on a single relationship between word and world. The real picture is much more complicated than this, and thus lexical associations are most useful when partnered with results from linguistic ethnography and its findings on pragmatically conditioned meanings. The evidence of how culture permeates the grammatical structure of language, and not just the lexicon, is ample and presented in studies such as the ones on honorific inflection and agreement in Japanese [47, 48], noun classes and categorization of nouns [49], extensive di erences in grammar of men's and women's speech [50], to mention but a few. Language requires concurrent ethnographic research. By widening the scope of the research paradigm to include an ethnography of speaking and a phenomenology of speech that looks at discourse schemas, use of pronouns, paralinguistic features, ways of speaking etc., we do not in our opinion lose the systemic presentations of lexico-semantic categories. We will end up with a research paradigm much richer in terms of lexico-pragmatic implications.

Characterised by its Vygotskyian Neohumboldtian comparative semantics pedigree, the Moscow school of linguistics places a great emphasis on culture as a source of conceptualizing experience through cognitive structures such as word associations. It uses natural language semantics as a cognitive approach to meaning and shows how cognition is structured. The Moscow school does not subscribe to a monolithic and essentialised notion of culture, but equally it starts from the point that cultural differences exist and thus it is legitimate to investigate how these are encoded in language using empirical means. With an objective of facilitating intercultural communication, it promotes analytical tools based on lexical association to understand these cultural differences better. It does not employ an abstract notion of culture, but instead speaks of cultural conceptualisations. The Moscow school now intends to go beyond the lexicon and examine cultural conceptualisation at all the grammatical levels of language. One weakness with the lexical approach is that languages represent `archives of conceptualisation' [51] that may have been active at some stage in the collective cultural cognition. As mentioned earlier, the mapping of language (lexical association) to culture is more complicated than one might infer from looking at the association data. Speakers should not be seen as `imprisoned' in their languages; an individual's lexical associations will reflect a rich tapestry of a multitude of cultural and social influences. One should therefore be cautious in drawing conclusions from lexical association data alone.

With the appeal of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach in particular, there has been of late a revival in the interest of cultural semantics. As more linguists question generative theories of language, we would expect this interest to accelerate and to embrace the semantic association tools that the Moscow school has developed. By engaging with ethnographic data, speech acts and by developing more of an ethnopragmatic approach that examines the diversity of speech practices and shows how both syntax and morphology encode grammar, the Moscow school should be well positioned to continue to reap the dividends of the recent interest in the language culture interface. As ethnography begins to team up with the use of digital data and Smartphone dictionary apps., our resources should become at some point in the future far more comprehensive than they ever have been before. Attempts to disentangle the language, culture, consciousness nexus from lexical associations based on Big Data analytics might be one of the beneficiaries of these developments.

Information about authors:

Stephen Pax Leonard - Ph.D., Associate Professor, Institute of Linguistics and Intercultural Communication, Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University (Moscow, Russia).

Ufimtseva Natalia - D.Sc. (Linguistics), Professor, Chair of the Department of Ethnopsycho- linguistics, Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow, Russia).

E- Markovina Irina - Ph.D. (Linguistics), Professor, Director of Institute of Linguistics and Intercultural Communication, Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University (Moscow, Russia).

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