About peculiarities of national language world mapping

Филологические науки / 9. Этно-, социо- и психолингвистика

Morel Morel D.A., candidate of philology

Belgorod State University, Russia

About peculiarities of national language world mapping

The terms “picture of the world” and “world image” are largely used not only in linguistics but also in many other humanities. Both Russian and western linguists (especially cognitive) distinguish two main kinds of such a picture: conceptual (mental) and language (verbal) [6; 7]. We use terms “categorization” and “conceptualization” in reference to the formation of the first one [14; 3; 11; 2: 42-47, 93; 16; 10] and “mapping” as concerns the segmentation of the second one.

It should be noted that such an application of the term “mapping” is not really opposed to its mathematical interpretation (as an operation that associates each element of a given set with one or more elements of a second set [15]) common for foreign scholars (e.g.: [19]). As we have proved the entitative, real world, conceptual and language pictures of world are in successive relations of homomorphism [5]. Therefore the process of mapping in this case may be related both to creating a virtual “map” of the real world and to revealing correlation between two kinds of pictures of the world.

The existence of national peculiarities in world mapping (as a process and its result) by the means of mental or public lexicon is a commonplace for the modern linguistics (q.v.: [3; 7; 10]). The goal of the present article is to consider such peculiarities using as the material the denominations of alcoholic drinks.

Our choice is conditioned by the ontological and anthropological features of this product. Firstly, on the one hand alcoholic drinks belongs to cultural universals, on the other hand they distinctively reflect national specifics being a part of national culture [1; 9: 94-123]. The corresponding concept is an integral element of national self-awareness (e.g.: [8]), self-identification: “Boisson-totem, subst. fém. Le vin est senti par la nation française comme un bien qui lui est propre, au même titre que ses trois cent soixante espèces de fromage et sa culture. C'est une boisson-totem (L'Express, 14 nov. 1977, p. 200, col. 3)” [20]. Secondly, being man-made they might be categorized intuitively and trivially but at the same time several researchers note the difficulty of categorizing artifacts [16; 18] (see also: [4]).

We have considered the lexical means representing alcoholic drinks in French, English and Russian languages. Firstly we have analyzed the corpus of a wide range of electronic lexicographic resources to separate out corresponding lexical fields. Then we have performed semantic analysis of generic parts of definitions [13: XXXVIII; 21] that helps us to subdivide the mentioned fields into lexico-semantic groups. The results are grouped in the table below where the numbers of lexical meanings (not words due to the polysemy) in each group are indicated in decreasing order.

French "Boissons alcoolisées"		English "Alcoholic drinks"		Russian "Алкогольные напитки"
vin	207	wine	102	вино	60
eau-de-vie	66	cocktail	54	водка	46
boissons diverses	64	alcoholic beverage (misc.)	49	спиртные напитки (разное)	40
liqueur	38	beer & brewage	40	водка ∩ наливка/настойка	20
bière	25	liqueur	39	наливка/настойка	17
alcool	18	liquor	28	пиво	17
apéritif	13	whisk(e)y	22	крепкие алкогольные напитки	12
cocktail	11	brandy	18	слабые алкогольные напитки	8
vin de liqueur	7			ликер	6
TOTAL:	449		352		226

This table implies that there is an analogy between French and Russian national mapping of alcoholic drinks segment of the world image. This analogy becomes closer when partially clustering the Russian lexical means. If we include the set of lexical meanings positioned at the intersection of groups “водка” and “наливка/настойка” to the last one the first six rates in French and Russian would match: 1) “vin” – “вино”; 2) “eau-de-vie” – “водка”; 3) “boissons diverses” – “спиртные напитки (разное)”; 4) “liqueur” – “наливка/настойка”; 5) “bière” – “пиво”; 6) “alcool” – “крепкие алкогольные напитки”.

The coincidence of “wine” and “miscellaneous” groups rates (the first and the third, respectively) in all three national fields should be noted.

The analysis of the revealed lexico-semantic groups lets us merge them into four generic clusters present in all three national language mappings of alcoholic drinks: “wine” (including aperitifs), “strong liquors”, “brewages” (mostly beer and ale), and “uncategorized”. The last cluster emergence (and its quantitative relevance) is related to the aforementioned difficulty of categorizing artifacts.

There is also typically western cluster comprising only one lexico-semantic group “cocktail”. It is not present in the Russian lexical system and more developed in English than in French. Such features of spread can be explained with reference to extralinguistic (sociocultural) factors.

Comparative percentage distribution by clusters is represented in the Figure 1. Two moments are quite striking here. Firstly we have to state considerable predominance of wine denominations in French that follows from peculiarities of national mentality [17] (see also the TLFi’s quotation above) and national material culture [12].

The predominance of strong liquors denominations in Russian also comes to our notice. It should be noted that none of groups forming this cluster in English is not in the top three (in terms of numbers), whereas “водка” group takes the second place in the Russian system of alcoholic drinks denominations as well as “eau-de-vie” does in the French one. But Russian and English “strong liquors” clusters are more minutely mapped as opposed to French.

The percentage ratios of other clusters (“brewages” and “uncategorized”) do not manifest significant discrepancy.

Fig. 1. National peculiarities of clustering alcoholic drinks denominations

In conclusion we are to emphasize that there are not crucial differences in national mapping of the world image segment under study. This circumstance is conditioned by the universal character of alcoholic drinks as a fact of culture.

However, the revealed mapping of the examined language material is not free from several national peculiarities. They are resulted from historically established features of alcoholic drinks production and consumption.

The most obvious distinction is revealed in terms of numbers: English and Russian systems of alcoholic drinks denominations make up 78% and 50%, respectively, of French one.

In terms of patterning national systems of alcoholic drinks denominations also have several differences. Even if the number of national lexico-semantic groups are purely comparable (8-9) their amount and composition rather differ. We cannot say that essential and evident interlanguage oppositions exist in the language material under study neither does the opposition “Russian vs. Western European” being of more profound and comprehensive nature. But if we merged three mentioned national systems into some kind of a virtual complex, this one would have the supranational kernel formed with six groups of denominations (wines, whiskeys, liquors, beers, liqueurs, uncategorized drinks) and the country-specific periphery (seven groups).

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