D. U. Ashurova m. R. Galieva cognitive linguistics

The anthropocentric paradigm and its status in modern linguistics

At the end of the XXth century the structural paradigm was replaced by a new anthropocentric paradigm. It has been proved that the structural model of language is not sufficient to account for language use. The anthropocentric paradigm concentrates its attention on the user of the language, his linguistic competence, knowledge structures reflected and fixed in the language.

The anthropocentric paradigm gives a man the status of being “the measure of all things” and focuses on studying the “human factor” in the language. The human is considered the centre of the Universe and language, because he is the only bearer of universal and nationally-specific values. Accordingly, Yu.S. Stepanov claims that linguistics is a science about “language in the human and the human in language” (Степанов, 1985, р.15). From the perspectives of this paradigm a human being is not just a bearer of a language, but rather of a certain conceptual system according to which he understands the language, cognizes and conceptualizes the world information.
Although the anthropocentric paradigm as a general framework emerged not long ago, its central assumptions are not new. The ideas of this science are traced back to the fundamental works by famous linguists (W. Humboldt, E. Sapir, B. Worf, E. Benvenist, A.A. Potebnya) and well-known philosophers (L. Witgenstein, P. Florenskiy, A. Losev, M. Heidegger, H. Hadamer). In their works they always emphasized the idea that language is a major instrument of representing, storing and transferring culture, knowledge, and information about the world around.
In this respect, Humboldt’s remark “Man lives in the world about him principally, indeed exclusively, as language presents it to him” is of great interest (Humboldt, 1999). Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf took up this idea and expanded on it. They brought attention to the relationship between language, thought, and culture. As E. Sapir asserted “Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression in their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection: The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world' is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group...Even comparatively simple acts of perception are very much more at the mercy of the social patterns called words than we might suppose...We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation” (Sapir, 1929).
The anthropocentric approach differs from other approaches to the study of language. Firstly, it presupposes the field of an interdisciplinary study. Language is a unique human capacity therefore it should be studied in complex interrelationships of human oriented disciplines such as psycholinguistics, communicative linguistics, linguopragmatics, sociolinguistics, linguoculturology, etc. All these disciplines are united under the aegis of the anthropocentric paradigm. Secondly, proceeding from the fact that a language user is a member of a certain linguistic community and attempts to achieve a certain interactional goal, language should be studied in complex relationships of linguistic and non-linguistic factors. Such non-linguistic factors as communicative and pragmatic intentions, social environment, philosophical and religious views, cultural and historical background influence, determine and specify the use of language. Thirdly, the study of language is grounded in language use, i.e. the knowledge of language is the knowledge of how to use it. It means that anthropocentric linguistics gives priority to a functional rather than structural approach to language.
So, the main assumptions of the anthropocentric paradigm are 1) anthropocentric linguistics is concerned with the study of the “human factor” in language; 2) language is considered a main tool of communication and cognition; 3) language is a means of storing and transmitting information and different knowledge structures which are externalized in linguistic expressions; 4) anthropocentric linguistics is an interdisciplinary science; 5) language studies involve both linguistic and extralinguistic factors; 6) the knowledge of language is derived from and grounded in language use.
Currently, many linguistic researches are done within the framework of the anthropocentric paradigm. The change of the paradigm caused the shift in linguistic views, methods of investigations and the emergence of new interdisciplinary linguistic trends (psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, cognitive linguistics, linguoculturology, gender linguistics). The most prominent scholars working in the domain of anthropocentric linguistics are G. Lacoff, M. Johnson, E.S.Kubryakova, N.N. Boldirev, Yu. S.Stepanov, V.N.Teliya, V.A. Maslova, etc.
Let’s briefly highlight some of the above-mentioned disciplines:
Psycholinguistics concentrates on studying psychological and neurobiological factors which make it possible to acquire, use, comprehend, produce and understand language. It attempts to explain what cognitive processes enable humans to compose sentences and speech, understand words, utterances, sentences, texts, etc.
Sociolinguistics is concerned with the relationships between language and society. It studies language varieties of different social groups in terms of ethnicity, social status, educational level, age, religion, etc. Special attention is paid to the study of dialects and sociolects.
Ethnolinguistics focuses on the relationships between language and ethnic culture, mostly in the historical retrospective. It studies how linguistic units reflect the way different ethnic groups perceive the world. The object of ethnolinguistics are folk texts (songs, jokes, fables, etc.), religious and mythological rituals. Its aim is the reconstruction of ethnic culture and vision of the world embodied in linguistic units.
Cognitive linguistics studies the relationships between language and mind, language and socio-psychological experience. In cognitive linguistics language is regarded as: a) a cognitive mechanism that encodes and transforms a great amount of information; b) an integral part of cognition that represents different types of knowledge structures; c) a mental phenomenon that provides access to the conceptual system of the human; d) a tool of processing, storing and transferring information. It focuses on investigation of the processes of conceptualization, categorization and perception of the world information, knowledge structures and their verbal representations.
Linguoculturology faces the problem of correlations between language and culture. Attention is focused on the cultural information embodied in linguistic units. It also studies verbalization of both universal and culture specific concepts that represent the conceptual and national world pictures.
Gender linguistics deals with the gender differentiation reflected in the language. Linguistic units are investigated from the point of view of their gender potential, i.e. how they represent socio-cultural characteristics, social norms, varieties of speech related to the masculine and feminine stereotypes.