ИССЛЕДОВАНИЕ НАЦИОНАЛЬНОЙ КАРТИНЫ МИРА ЧЕРЕЗ ПРИЗМУ ОБЩЕСТВЕННО-ПОЛИТИЧЕСКОГО ДИСКУРСА

Научная статья
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18454/RULB.6.09
Выпуск: № 2 (6), 2016
PDF

Аннотация

В статье определяются методологические основы изучения национально-культурной специфики картины мира через призму общественно-политического дискурса. Картина мира как определенная система знаний, представлений, ценностных суждений, вырабатываемых совокупными усилиями членов лингвокультурного сообщества и зафиксированных посредством слова или текста, представляет результаты познавательной деятельности, что позволяет исследовать ее через призму структурных параметров. На материале сезонной выборки, подготовленной по канадской франкоязычной газете Le Devoir, предлагается целый ряд приемов и процедур моделирования параметров картины мира, среди которых  выделение ключевых концептов, моделирование когнитивной, полевой и смысловой структур концептов как структурных элементов картины мира.

Introduction

National-cultural specificity of the world picture is one of the most topical research subjects in modern linguistics that reflects a general tendency of various sciences to make culture a central element of all theoretical constructions connected with the study of man [17, P. 204]. Yet, when being under discussion, the subject becomes more complicated as the term 'world picture' is rather vague and many-sided. Moreover, it is often used as a synonym to another term -'world image', though in our opinion, they differ.

World picture can be considered as a result of an individual and collective cognitive-discursive activity. One of the indispensable conditions of its functioning is the reflection or materialization in language. It is the so-called 'surface layer' of the world reflection which can be registered through pieces of knowledge represented in word or text (discourse) [10, P. 12-16].

World picture is a system of awareness, ideas, value judgemnets which is formed at a certain stage of the historic development of a linguacultural community. Therefore, national world pictures primarily form and function in nonidentity conditions that results in a variability of the world picture for different language and culture bearers. Thereupon, one of the main issues that needs to be clarified - how culture and medium influence the content and structure of knowledge. It is also important to notice that despite numerous works focused on a comparative study of some knowledge fragments and awareness images we cannot give a definite answer what a real mechanism of influence on the part of culture on the specificity of knowledge and awareness is.

A study of the national-cultural specificity of the world representation should include a comparative research analysis on various levels of knowledge functioning that makes it important to identify the parameters of the world picture and its key fragments (or segments).

World picture as a systemic phenomenon    

First of all, world picture can be characterized through such parameters as a systemic order and definite structure. Thus, knowledge acquired and shared by the community is most likely to be systemically organized. That fact can be supported by neurophysiological data concerning 'semantic memory', or 'semantic thesaurus'. Semantic thesaurus is viewed as “arranged knowledge about words and other symbols, their meanings and relations between them possessed by an individual” [16, P. 399]. The idea of preserving knowledge through systemically arranged thematic groups has been suggested by M. Devitt and K. Sterelny [2], T. Givón [4], S.D. Katsnelson [6], V.F. Petrenko [14, P. 111], etc. As for the semantic structuring of knowledge in the individual and collective awareness, it reveals itself through distinguishing certain layers and pieces of knowledge, or through a system of concepts.

Second, the structuredness of experience and knowledge gives evidence to a hierarchical order in the knowledge arrangement: either group or individual experience cannot but be structurally organized (see, for example:[12]; [1, 18]; [18]). It allows us to surmise that different knowledge layers in the structure of the national sphere of concepts are of an unequal value.

We suggest that it should be possible to distinguish a core in the national world picture - the part that is formed owing to the reflection by key concepts the most essential information of a certain culture. Being vitally important for the members of a linguacultural community, this information is regularly reproduced in the social discourse and fixed in the linguistic awareness. Key concepts of culture make up the most significant fragments of the cumulative experience and knowledge developed by a linguo-social group during a certain period of time. Hence, distinguishing key concepts of culture as well as a comparative analysis of their content can be considered as one of the methods to identify a specificity in national world pictures.

Carrying out comparative research with special reference to social-political discourse poses a task of modelling some units that would be able to represent world picture. Despite our avowing the fact of the existing controversy between scholars which concerns a basic unit of storing knowledge, we may suppose concept to be acknowledged the main structural unit of the world picture. As for the term 'concept', it has been used in Linguistics since the 90-s but still has not acquired a unified interpretation: it is defined as a “quantum of knowledge”, an informative operative memory unit, a part of the mental lexicon belonging to the conceptual system and the language of the brain, a unit of individual knowledge and awareness [8, P. 90], an “operative unit of awareness” [5], a cell of culture in the mental world of the human being [15]. The notion of concept is often revealed through senses developed by man in the process of his/her thinking which reflect experience, knowledge, and results of all human activities while cognizing the world through “knowledge quanta” [5, P. 71].

The aspect of interrelation between concept and language does not show a unanimity in the interpretation also, but we adhere to the opinion of concept as a hierarchically structured and systemized unit of knowledge characterized by a certain set of semantic features which cannot be distinguished but only through language (see also: [3]).

Going back to the national world picture, it is important to mention its dynamic in time nature as a result of being formed in the course of a cognitive discursive activity of individuals and society. What influences the dynamics of world picture still provokes vehement discussions. Thus, S.V. Lurie claims that “a shift in the world picture and adjacent traditional knowledge takes place if an existing world picture loses its adaptive characteristics, or a society changes its value dominants” [13, P. 597].

At the same time, taking into consideration one of the conspicuous features of world picture, namely, that it is originally based on values, we ought to dwell on the importance of values for culture and man in general. As is known, a value orientation determines a person's behaviour in his/her everyday contacts with the environment. Values followed by an individual are responsible for a cognitive-discursive specificity of all the activity of a person and his/her community as well. Due to this, the processes of meaning-making take their course in accord with the accepted in a certain culture norms. Thus, distinguishing and analyzing value dominants ought to be recognized as a parameter of significance when describing national-cultural specificity of the world picture. A logical conclusion that follows leads us to recognizing a direct link between the dynamics of the world picture and its value orientations: under the influence of its value specificity every world picture will show differences reflected in its structure as well as in the content of particular concepts.

Any drastic social changes, such as revolutions, global cataclysms and challenges, cause world picture transformations. Whereas the world picture itself can be interpreted as a result of social cognitive-discursive practices, any turn in the vector of social and political discourse will reflect a change (or shift) in the structure and content of the world picture.

Thus, owing to the increase of the communication and information constituent in modern society, a special role belongs to social and political discourse as a specific sphere where information is accumulated and functions. At the same time, the number of research dwelling on the national-cultural specificity of the world picture through the prism of social and political discourse can hardly be recognized as numerous. That fact evidently can be explained by a lack of valid methods and principles of analysis rested upon well-balanced theoretical foundations as well. Hence, we make it our immediate aim to work out an algorithm of modelling functional basics of the world picture representation as well as to develop a set of experimental procedures which would help to determine its structural parameters.

As for this paper, we would like to dwell on some principles of modelling world picture with special reference to the newspaper discourse of Canada. The applied analysis was based on several procedures:

  1. distinguishing key concepts following the criterion of seasonal data sampling;

  2. modelling a cognitive and field structure of concepts belonging to the social-political discourse of Canada on the basis of monthly and seasonal data;

  3. modelling a semantic structure of each concept;

  4. identifying semantic dominants in the national world picture of Canada.

The material of the research has been selected from an independent Canadian newspaper “Le Devoir” for three summer months of 2015. The newspaper is a daily edition (issued every day, except Sundays), published in French in Montreal, the Province of Quebec. For the aforementioned period 79 online issues have been processed that has resulted in selecting 1780 articles for the analysis.     

Semantic and structural parameters of the world picture

At the first stage of the research the key concepts of the Canadian newspaper discourse have been distinguished. The required data were collected while analyzing the newspaper daily columns, namely: Politics of Canada, Politics of Quebec, Economy, Society, Environment, Culture, Sport. The corresponding key concepts have been distinguished on the basis of the quantity criterion (see table 1) with 10 percent of all the content for the period as the lower limit for each key concept.

Table 1

The key concepts of the Canadian newspaper discourse

(with special reference to the newspaper “Le Devoir”, June-August 2015)

 Newspaper columns

 

 

 

 

 

 

The number of articles

Total

June

July

August

1.

Politics of Quebec

169

28

78

275

2.

Politics of Canada

150

127

244

521

3.

Economy

138

119

119

376

4.

Environment

36

45

30

111

5.

Society

77

88

70

235

6.

Culture

53

46

25

124

7.

Sport

37

61

40

138

 

Total

660

514

606

1780 

As we may conclude according to the material of the table, the key concepts of the Canadian newspaper discourse (summer data) cover the following fields:

Politics of Canada (521 articles)

Economy (376 articles)

Politics of Quebec (275 articles)

Society (235 articles)

These concepts can be considered the so-called 'peaks' of the national social and political discourse. In other words, for the given period these concepts show as detailed a representation as possible in the public awareness of the Canadian dwellers (in the Province of Quebec) and make up a core of the sphere of concepts in the newspaper discourse. Other units, such as Environment, Culture, and Sport, which were not referred to the key ones, can be marked as basic concepts.

The next step of the analysis had a target to specify further peculiarities of the world picture functioning, namely: to describe a cognitive and field structure of the concepts. As for the basic procedure applied at this stage of data processing, it was a content-analysis expanded with some methods of psycholinguistics (see: [9]; [10]; [11]). The following methods have been applied to model a cognitive structure of the concepts:

  1. distinguishing a topical issue for an article with its further modelling into a cognitive feature;
  2. arranging cognitive features as cognitive layers;
  3. ranking cognitive layers in accord with their content;
  4. modelling a concept cognitive structure on the basis of monthly data;
  5. modelling a concept cognitive structure on the basis of seasonal data;
  6. modelling a concept field structure.

Ranking semantic layers has been made in terms of the topical frequency of the articles, or semantic features (see tab. 2).

Table 2 The cognitive structure of the concept Society

(in relation to the materials of the column “Actualités en société ”, June 2015; 77 entries)

Personalia - 14

Human rights - 13

Ethic issues: native people – 12

Culture and science – 12

Social issues - 8

Settlements improvement – 3

Dwellers' bold initiatives – 3

Incidents/accidents – 3

Town/city security – 3

Ethical issues – 2

Administration of justice – 2

Natural cataclysms, ecology – 2

 

         Following the results of the seasonal summary data sampling (for June-August of 2015) it has become possible to construct an overall cognitive structure of the concept SOCIETY (see tab. 3). As is seen from the table, it differs somewhat from its initial variant: a new cognitive layer Economy has appeared. Besides, the hierarchy of the levels has been changed too (see tab. 3).

Table 3 The cognitive structure of the concept Society

(in relation to the materials of the column “Actualités en société”, June-August 2015)

 

Personalia - 29

Incidents/accidents – 27

Ethic issues: native people – 25

Human rights - 24

Social issues - 22

Culture and science – 20

Town/city security – 17

Economy – 16

Ethical issues, life style – 11

Dwellers' bold initiatives – 10

Settlements improvement – 10

Natural cataclysms, ecology – 7

Administration of justice – 5

It is just the concept cognitive structure that has been used as a basis for a comparative analysis targeting at distinguishing national-cultural specificity of the world picture through the prism of the Canadian social-political discourse.

For the purpose of further modelling the structure of the concept, we ought to differentiate a core and periphery zone: thus, a core is to include all the layers ranking no fewer than 10 percent of the total content, a near-core zone is made up by layers with 5 percent as the lower limit of the content. Layers ranking as fewer than 5 percent of the total content are classified as a periphery. So, the field structure of the concept can be represented as follows (see tab. 4):

Table 4 The field structure of the concept society

(in relation to the materials of the column “Actualités en société”, June-August 2015)

Core: more than 10%

Personalia - 29

Incidents/accidents – 27

Ethic issues: native people – 25

Human rights - 24

Near-core zone: more than 5 %

Social issues - 22

Culture and science – 20

Town/city security – 17

Economy – 16

Periphery: fewer than 5 %

Ethical issues, life style – 11

Dwellers' bold initiatives – 10

Settlements improvement – 10

As appears from table 4, the concept society has a systematized and hierarchically arranged structure with a core, and two lower ranked zones - a near-core part and a periphery with a certain number of semantic layers (see the table).

The next procedure – modelling the concept semantic structure – has been based on the semantic analysis of the cognitive features and permitted to detail the content of the concept. Arranging the semantic features in accord with the quantity criterion has revealed the following semantic structure of the concept being described (see a fragment of the cognitive structure - the arrangement of features within the layer “Human rights” in tab. 5):

Table 5 The semantic structure of the concept society (a fragment)

(in relation to the materials of the column “Actualités en société ”, June-August 2015)

Semantic features

Total

2.

Human rights

13

2.1.

Human rights defenders' support

4

2.1.1

The protection of Saudi blogger Raif Badawi and his wife

4

2.2.

The protection of the human rights of women: spousal assault

3

2.3.

The protection of the rights of sexual minorities

1

2.4.

The protection of the rights of working people: protests against a rigid economic policy

1

2.5.

The protection of the rights of the Haitian refugees

1

 

At the final stage of the research the distinguishing of semantic dominants within the world picture has been made with the help of further procedures:

  1. modelling a semantic structure of the concept using monthly selected data;
  2. distinguishing the three most frequent semantic features for each concept for every season of the year (a three-month period);
  3. determining semantic dominants of the Canadian social-political discourse for every season of the year (a three-month period).

         The application of all the research procedures to the analysis of the Canadian social-political discourse has made it possible to distinguish the following semantic layers (for all the concepts - Politics of Canada, Politics of Quebec, Economy, Society, Environment, Culture, Sport - claimed as being under analysis):

The economic development of Canada (223 features)

Federal elections (190 features)

Political parties struggle (175 features)

Personality and his/her role in the life of the country (157 features)

Culture and environment preservation (123 features)

 

Conclusion

National world picture emerging in the course of interrelations and communication in the society, sensitively responds to social and political changes and absorbs all the typological peculiarities of its culture that results in:

  1. a specific mapping and architecture of the sphere of concepts reflected in social-political discourse;
  2. a peculiar cognitive and semantic structure of concepts;
  3. a specific arrangement of the semantic dominants in social-political discourse.

Represented in the paper methods of studying a national-cultural specificity of the public awareness include several ways and procedures aimed at reconstructing structural parameters of the world picture as a cohesion of a horizontal (key concepts) and vertical (the semantic structure of a concept) aspects.

Such an approach, when applied to the study of social-political discourse, permits to differentiate key and basic concepts in it, to determine the topicality of public phenomena in the public awareness, and to find out what semantic dominants are considered as prevalent for the public awareness of the representatives of a society - bearers of a certain culture and language.

The principles of modelling a cognitive and semantic structure of the concept as well as distinguishing its semantic dominants can be successfully applied in the Humanities while studying the public awareness.

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