Interpretation of Linguoculturology in Literature

Abstract

Linguocultural competence enables students to better understand and respect common behavioral patterns, ways of thinking and rules of verbal and non-verbal communication within both their own socio-ethnic community and a foreign one. It arms them with skills required to interact with representatives of other linguocultural societies while knowledge about the world processed and stored in the form of concepts and channeled through language units helps build cognitive foundations of communication.

Introduction

I. INTRODUCTION

Linguocultural approach of teaching foreign languages considers language as a carrier of culture, so the knowledge of culture comes from language and systems of national-cultural concepts coded in it. Learning a foreign language, students begin to experience and understand how the world is differently structured and conceptualized in different cultures and language groups – age-related, social, ethnic, professional and etc. According to some researchers, a great opportunity to expand that knowledge and build strong linguocultural competence would be analyzing foreign literature in classroom [Gomez, 2012: 55].

The importance of linguocultural competence development in students learning foreign languages and translation techniques cannot be overestimated. Translators and interpreters should be encouraged to go beyond basic linguistic and cultural knowledge into reflecting over values and norms applicable to a given culture and language and various rules and traditions existing within a language community and around the world.

Linguocultural competence is based on language proficiency and cultural knowledge, is likely to boost students’ intercultural competence as well – their tolerance and respect towards different value systems – providing more opportunities to become sought-after professionals on the globalized labour market. The author agrees with that the most effective method of building linguocultural competence is to engage students in reading and analyzing authentic texts, foreign literature in particular. However, we argue that not all types of text analysis from those existing within the realm of literature studies and linguistics are suitable for the task, so the priority should be given to the ones listed below.

This analysis is aimed at determining and motivating factors is key events and interactions happening in a work of fiction. This technique allows decomposing a single text into semantically integral, conceptually connected fragments – “subplots and motives”. As the result, we are able to identify recurrent themes, character types, conflicts, behavioral patterns, tropes and motives, accumulating culture- and language-specific information.

Biographical analysis is a technique to reconstruct the spirit of the era portrayed in a literary text by exploring the life of its author. Every text is marked with the author’s reminiscences, either explicit or implicit, about his or her life experience and worldview. As postulated in hermeneutics, the envision the whole of reality we can study its parts, such as the detailed experience of everyday existence by an individual. In that respect, the author of a foreign language fiction work might be treated as a valid representative of his or her culture and facts from his or her biography help interpret the cultural meaning of the text.

Conceptual analysis aims to detect key concepts of the literary text. Though a fiction work is expected to reflect its author’s personal view of the world and value system, it might as well channel general concepts with invariant cultural meaning and the nation’s collective mentality.  Stylistic analysis serves to establish stylistic means that most contribute to getting the message across and presenting the main idea. In the cultural aspect, stylistic analysis is predominantly an additional type of analysis employed to identify the mood, tonality and cultural and emotional connotations the text carries along.

Distribution analysis is a type of semantic analysis that pays close attention to collocations featured in a literary text – clusters of words that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. Collocations may vary greatly from language to language, meaning they are culture-specific, thus knowledge of fixed collocations is vital for understanding the language picture of the world.

Component analysis is another example of semantic analysis done by breaking word definitions featured in dictionaries into minimal semantic components. The method aids in determining the cultural implications attached to the words and expressions under consideration, as well as identifying differences in the volume of semantic domains in different languages.

To ensure that students use all seven types of literary and linguistic analysis and, as a result, build linguocultural competency, the structure of foreign literature textbooks and manuals may use the patterns.

Nowadays, knowing a foreign language and learning is becoming a modern requirement all over the world. It is well-known that everyone belongs to a specific culture that includes national traditions, language, history, literature. International economic, cultural and scientific relations have led to the interpretation of language as a means of reflecting culture. As E. Sepir points out, language is a guiding tool in the study of culture. When learning a language, it is important to know not only the words, language chunks and speech but also the culture, worldview, lifestyle and customs of the country of the target language. This, in turn, has led to the emergence of a new field in linguistics, namely, the evolution of linguocultural studies [?????, 1993: 263].

Linguocultural studies is a complicated subject of science that arose from the interaction of linguistics and culture. It investigates the interplay between language and culture, as well as language as a cultural phenomena. This is the perception of the world through the lens of a national language to some extent, the manifestation of language through the mentality and culture of a particular nation. Because it is novel, it has not been well investigated, and the prevalence of differing opinions and viewpoints necessitates extensive scientific inquiry. V.N. Telia defines Linguoculturology as “a study aimed at investigating and describing the correlation between language and culture in scope of modern culture national self-consciousness and its sign representation” [?????, 1999: 16]. V.V. Krasnykh considers Linguoculturology is to be “a discipline studying manifestation, reflection and fixation of culture in the language and discourse” [???????, 2002: 27]. Though the aforementioned definitions differ, the underlying idea is that Linguoculturology studies the link between language and culture. Linguoculturology, in other words, is the study of the connections between language and culture, as well as the ways in which culture is communicated via language and the ways in which language carries, stores, and transmits cultural information.

A Russian philologist S.G. Ter-Minasova symbolizes a language to a cultural treasure [???-????????, 2000: 15]. Language preserves cultural qualities in its vocabulary, grammar, idiom, articles, folklore, fiction, and scientific literature, as well as in oral and written speech, according to her theory. The socio-cultural layer or component of culture is manifested as part of the language when we look at its structure, expression, and ways of acquisition.

Language is a major social weapon that creates ethnic social currents, protects and transmits the culture, traditions, and social awareness of a community that speaks the same language, and therefore constitutes the basis for nation-building. When language is employed as a nation's principal emblem, it can be seen from both inside and without. When considered as a 'from within' process, language emerges as one of the most essential components in people's mutual integration. One ethnic group can be distinguished from other ethnic groups from the outside.

References

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Copyright

Copyright © 2022 Mukhamedova Shakhlo Mukhammadaliyevna. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.