Table Of ContentМинистерство науки и высшего образования Российской Федерации
Южно-Уральский государственный университет
Кафедра иностранных языков
Ш143.21
C454
Н.С. Скрипичникова, Е.С. Баландина, Е.И. Хабирова
PHILOLOGY IN THE SYSTEM
OF CONTEMPORARY
HUMANITARIAN DISCIPLINES
Учебное пособие
Челябинск
Издательский центр ЮУрГУ
2019
ББК Ш143.21-923
C454
Одобрено
учебно-методической комиссией
Института лингвистики и международных коммуникаций
Рецензенты:
к.филол.н. А.В. Таскаева, к.филол.н. Н.В. Иванченко
Скрипичникова, Н.С.
C454 Philology in the system of contemporary humanitarian disciplines: учебное пособие /
Н.С. Скрипичникова, Е.С. Баландина, Е.И. Хабирова. – Челябинск: Издательский
центр ЮУрГУ, 2019. – 119 с.
Учебное пособие предназначено для магистрантов I курса, обучающихся по
направлению подготовки 45.04.01 «Филология (Теория и практика английского
языка)». Цель пособия – формирование основ филологического знания как системы.
В пособии, написанном на английском языке, освещаются вопросы, связанные с
различными междисциплинарными аспектами современной филологии:
этнолингвистика, психолингвистика, социолингвистика, когнитивная лингвистика,
коммуникативная лингвистика. Практическая часть включает упражнения и задания,
которые могут быть использованы как на аудиторных занятиях, так и для
самостоятельной работы. В приложении приводится глоссарий ключевых терминов и
краткий справочник выдающихся ученых в области филологии.
Учебное пособие соответствует требованиям Федерального государственного
образовательного стандарта.
ББК Ш143.21-923
© Издательский центр ЮУрГУ, 2019
2
CONTENTS
1. HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL STUDIES……………………………………. 4
2. LINGUISTICS AS A CENTRAL PART OF HUMANITIES………………… 10
3. ETHNOLINGUISTICS OR CULTURAL LINGUISTICS…………………… 19
4. GENDER LINGUISTICS……………………………………………………... 28
5. PSYCHOLINGUISTICS……………………………………………………… 35
6. SOCIOLINGUISTICS………………………………………………………… 44
7. COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS…………………………………………………. 54
8. COMMUNICATIVE LINGUISTICS…………………………………………. 67
9. OTHER RELATIONSHIPS…………………………………………………… 75
10. PRACTICE……………………………………………………………………. 79
GLOSSARY……………………………………………………………................. 94
APPENDIX……………………………………………………………………...... 103
REFERENCES…………………………………………………………................. 117
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1. HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL STUDIES
Often pitted against the sciences, the humanities and sciences go hand-in-hand
in understanding the world around us.
Alyssa Walker
Discuss in pairs
Why is it important to understand and study humanities and social science?
Basic terms:
ANTHROPOLOGY The study of human societies and cultural diversity. Anthropology became a formal,
professionalised discipline in the 19th century. In the early 20th century,
anthropology in the United States took on a 4-fields approach, which subdivided the
discipline into cultural anthropology, physical anthropology, linguistic anthropology
and archaeology. However, contemporary anthropology encompasses many, more
varied approaches.
CIVIL SOCIETY When people voluntarily participate in public life, but not government, to achieve a
common end. Eastwood argues that ‘what civil society encompasses is a highly
contested subject in political and social theory’. Civil society includes individuals,
families and non-government organisations.
CONSCIOUSNESS A waking state in which an individual experiences and perceives thoughts and
feelings. Consciousness is an awareness of the world and oneself. McFarland notes
that consciousness is a human mental state that is sometimes attributed to animals.
However, ‘Whether non-human animals have conscious experiences is a matter of
controversy. For example, some believe that language is necessary for consciousness,
while others do not believe this’.
DISCOURSE In popular usage, refers to spoken or written communication. However, when used by
academics, discourse is often referring to knowledge of a particular area – for
example, ‘political discourse’ or ‘colonial discourse’. This usage is derived from
Michel Foucault, for whom a discourse was ‘a strongly bounded area of social
knowledge, a system of statements within which the world can be known’.
EPISTEMOLOGY The study or theory of knowledge; the word is derived from the Greek episteme,
meaning ‘knowledge’. This inquiry focuses on ‘the conditions, paradigms, and limits
of knowledge, including the nature of truth claims and the historical contexts that
have shaped human inquiry’. Epistemology is concerned with propositional
knowledge, or the knowledge of facts, such as ‘3 plus 3 is 6’. Epistemology seeks to
answer questions such as How can we know reality? What are acceptable sources of
knowledge? How does knowledge differ from opinion or belief?
HUMANITIES Visualization dedicated to exploring humanities questions. Visualizations in the
VISUALIZATION service of interpretation, constructivist (acknowledging the human-constructedness of
human knowledge).
HUMANITIES Often a topic related to culture and open to interpretation. Your evidence is portrayals
RESEARCH of the human experience and artifacts of human culture. Often have theoretical
QUESTION agendas and are transparent about perspectives. To judge a humanities argument, we
examine whether it has sound internal logic, whether it is relevant to the question,
whether it has depth, helps you understand the world
KNOWLEDGE Propositional knowledge or ‘knowledge-that’ is the knowledge of facts – for
example, knowing that cows are mammals. This is distinct from practical knowledge
or ‘knowledge-how’ – for example, knowing how to play the guitar. Sociologists
such as Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann have pointed out that knowledge is
something that is created by humans and as such will vary culturally and historically.
LITERATURE Written works, including novels, short stories and poetry. Literature is a collective
term and the boundaries of what it encompasses are porous. The term implies that the
written work is of high quality and is held in esteem.
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ONTOLOGY The philosophical study of ‘being’. It is concerned with what we know about reality
or what exists. An example of an ontological problem is the question of whether
numbers exist. Ontology is also associated with research methods in the social
sciences.
Task 1
The central concept of social science and humanities is HUMAN. Read the following article and
explain the position of the term in humanity and social science research.
An animal species known by the scientific name Homo sapiens.
Sharing a common primate ancestor with apes, humans began evolving
on the African continent somewhere between 6 million and 2 million
years ago. The ability to walk on 2 legs occurred approximately 4
million years ago. Many different species of humans evolved during
this period; some survived for longer than others, but all died out.
Homo neanderthalensis (Neanderthal) is the closest species to Homo sapiens. Neanderthals are thought
to have died out approximately 40 000 years ago. The chimpanzee (genus Pan) is the closest relative of
the human (Homo) species.
Approximately 2 million years ago, humans began migrating to the Asian and European
continents. Approximately 60 000 years ago, humans migrated to the Australian continent, and
approximately 30 000 years ago they migrated to the North and South American continents.
The human brain is large and complex. The species is characterised by its capacity for language,
its ability to design and use sophisticated tools, and to understand and represent abstract concepts.
Following the growth of complex social structures, humans developed culture approximately 70 000
years ago.
Human development accelerated more quickly after the start of agriculture approximately 12 000
years ago, and has continued to accelerate since as improvements in technology and communication
have facilitated more connections between humans, and scientific discoveries, including in medicine,
have improved health and lifespan. The human species exhibits racial, ethnic, gender and cultural
diversity. Humans also differ in their physical appearance, their blood type and their DNA sequence –
no 2 humans are exactly alike (even identical twins).
Human exceptionalism
The belief that humans are unique and different from all other animals. This understanding is not
universal. Various cultures in different time periods have held beliefs that understand the division (or
lack thereof) between animals and humans differently. A common belief in the West is that humans
possess intellect, consciousness, communication skills and free will in a manner superior to any other
animal. This is the foundation of a belief in human superiority and has been used to justify the control
of other animal species. However, in other cultures, animals can be considered sacred, holy or even
divine. In these cultures, human exceptionalism is a less powerful notion.
For further reading:
DeMello, M 2005, Animals and society: an introduction to human–animal studies, Columbia
University Press, New York.
Harari, YN 2015, Sapiens: a brief history of humankind, Harper, New York.
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Task 2
Read the following information. What is the basic difference between two terms?
SOCIAL SCIENCES
The ‘social sciences’ is a categorisation of academic disciplines that
study social life including sociology, human geography, economics,
linguistics, anthropology and political science. Whereas the life
sciences analyse the physical world, the social sciences analyse the
social world. Social science research is concerned with things such
as how society functions, human relationships, social policy, and
social change and the influence this has on individuals. The social
sciences became core curricula in universities from the late 19th
century onwards.
HUMANITIES
The academic discipline focused on the study of human culture. The term and the discipline of study
came to prominence in the Renaissance period, and are connected to the rise in humanism and
humanist thought. During the Renaissance, studying the humanities was thought to make one more
cultured and refined. Students of the humanities would read the classics, poetry, history and
philosophy, and learn about grammar and rhetoric.
Task 3
Read the following information. Do the tasks after the text.
Anthropogenic civilization and technocratic thinking are
declining in the conditions of modern society. The value of
human existence in its harmony with the outside world is
becoming increasingly important. This leads to increased
attention to the meaning of what is happening and being created
by a person, to social and humanitarian knowledge and to a person forming a social and humanitarian
education.
Creativity and dialogue are becoming the most important characteristics of the modern model of
the development of social and humanitarian knowledge, which is based on the new social development
paradigm, when the focus is on a person, his development, values and the meaning of his life.
This is explained by the connection with the fundamental issues of human existence, since objects
and phenomena of the surrounding world not only possess inherent objective properties reflected in
consciousness, but also have certain connections with a person, contributing to the cognition of objects
and phenomena of reality and their evaluation. Obviously, it makes up the value system, global
thinking, ability to analyze various information flows, readiness for creative problem solving, etc.
Socio-humanitarian knowledge acts as a kind of mediator between the achievements of the culture
of the past, present and future, reconciling them at the level of a reflexive attitude to the possibility of a
productive dialogue of the times.
The word "humanities" is derived from the Renaissance Latin expression studia humanitatis, or
"study of humanitas" (a classical Latin word meaning–in addition to "humanity"–"culture, refinement,
education" and, specifically, an "education befitting a cultivated man"). In its usage in the early 15th
century, the studia humanitatis was a course of studies that consisted of grammar, poetry, rhetoric,
history, and moral philosophy, primarily derived from the study of Latin and Greek classics.
Generally, human beings possess and show quality like rationality, kindness and tenderness. Such
basic qualities of humans gain different connotations based on one’s environment, values, beliefs and
experiences. They are the contributing factors to the refinement of human’s basic qualities.
Humanities, however, should not be confused with the term humanism, which refers to a specific
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philosophical belief, nor with humanitarianism, which is the concern for charitable works and social
reform. Academically, we refer to the humanities as the branches of learning concerned with the
human thought, feelings and relations. Humanities have always been concern with the importance of
human being, his feelings, and how he expresses those feelings.
Humanities are academic disciplines that study aspects of human society and culture. In
the Renaissance, the term contrasted with divinity and referred to what is now called classics, the main
area of secular study in universities at the time. Today, the humanities are more frequently contrasted
with natural and social sciences as well as professional training.
The humanities use methods that are primarily critical, or speculative, and have a significant
historical element - as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural sciences, yet,
unlike the sciences, it has no central discipline. The humanities include ancient and modern
languages, literature, philosophy, history, human geography, law, politics, religion, and art.
1. Give a definition of the ‘humanities’ which you think is the more
appropriate and comprehensive.
2. Explain the meaning of the statement “the study of human experience is
the study of mankind”.
Task 4
Read the following information and answer the question: “Why text is a central part of any
social science?”
In the literature, the humanities are defined as a group of academic disciplines united by the desire
to study such aspects of human existence and qualitative approaches that do not imply a single
scientific paradigm. The humanities are social sciences exploring cultural phenomena in their various
manifestations and development. For example, history or cultural studies. However, for many
scientists, for example M.M. Bakhtin, humanities are the sciences about man, his spiritual inner world,
his intelligence, psyche, and also the product of this inner world from the point of view of his
reflection in him”.
We can distinguish the socio-economic sciences (sociology, political science, economic
disciplines, law science), which study man and society in reality. And the humanities proper (for
example, history, philology) explore homo sapiens and society in a reflected reality that perceived by
an individual (reflected in his consciousness), in one way or another meaningful way and that is
revealed in the form of an oral or written text.
Humanitarian knowledge is a specific form of reality reflection that is mediated in texts. Hence the
central thesis by M.M. Bakhtin: “The text is the primary given reality and the starting point of any
humanitarian discipline.”
Within the humanities differentiation is carried out according to the criterion of attitude to the text.
So, for the historian the text is a document. The historian in the text looks for evidence of the reality.
The text serves as a means and is evaluated solely by the reliability degree, the adequacy of the
message to real events. The text is the window through which the historian tries to see what was in
reality.
For the philologist, the text is not only an object, but also a subject of study. The text is valuable in
itself. This is not a document, but a basis which is worthy of a comprehensive study. The following
statement is significant in this respect: “For the historian, the structural unit of memoirs is a
documented historical episode. For a philologist, documentary accuracy is not enough. He is interested
in the artistic merit of the work.”
Find the information about “Text Research in Linguistics” by M.M. Bakhtin.
What other prominent researchers are engaged in this scientific area?
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Task 5
Read the following information and explain the following terms: cohesion, coherence,
intentionality, acceptability, informativity, situationality, and intertextuality.
SEVEN PRINCIPLES OF TEXTUALITY
"[The] seven principles of textuality: cohesion, coherence, intentionality, acceptability,
informativity, situationality, and intertextuality, demonstrate how richly every text is connected to your
knowledge of world and society, even a telephone directory. Since the appearance of the Introduction
to Text Linguistics [by Robert de Beaugrande and Wolfgang Dressler] in 1981, which used these
principles as its framework, we need to emphasize that they designate the major modes of
connectedness and not (as some studies assumed) the linguistic features of text-artifacts nor
the borderline between 'texts' versus 'non-texts' . The principles apply wherever an artifact is
'textualized,' even if someone judges the results 'incoherent,' 'unintentional,' 'unacceptable,' and so on.
Such judgments indicate that the text is not appropriate (suitable to the occasion), or efficient (easy to
handle), or effective (helpful for the goal); but it is still a text. Usually, disturbances or irregularities
are discounted or at worst construed as signals of spontaneity, stress, overload, ignorance, and so on,
and not as a loss or a denial of textuality."
Task 6
Read more information about text linguistics and answer the questions given below.
In linguistics, the term text refers to:
1. The original words of something written, printed, or spoken, in contrast to a summary or
paraphrase.
2. A coherent stretch of language that may be regarded as an object of critical analysis.
Text linguistics refers to a form of discourse analysis – a method of studying written or spoken
language – that is concerned with the description and analysis of extended texts (those beyond the
level of the single sentence). A text can be an example of written or spoken language, from something
as complex as a book or legal document to something as simple as the body of an email or the words
on the back of a cereal box.
In the humanities, different fields of study concern themselves with different forms of texts.
Literary theorists, for example, focus primarily on literary texts – novels, essays, stories, and poems.
Legal scholars focus on legal texts such as laws, contracts, decrees, and regulations. Cultural theorists
work with a wide variety of texts, including those that may not typically be the subject of studies, such
as advertisements, signage, instruction manuals, and other ephemera.
Text Definition
Traditionally, a text is understood to be a piece of written or spoken material in its primary form
(as opposed to a paraphrase or summary). A text is any stretch of language that can be understood in
context. It may be as simple as one word (such as a stop sign) or as complex as a novel. Any sequence
of sentences that belong together can be considered a text.
Text refers to content rather than form; for example, if you were talking about the text of "Don
Quixote," you would be referring to the words in the book, not the physical book itself. Information
related to a text, and often printed alongside it – such as an author's name, the publisher, the date of
publication, etc.–is known as paratext.
The idea of what constitutes a text has evolved over time. In recent years, the dynamics of
technology – especially social media – have expanded the notion of the text to include symbols such as
emoticons and emojis. A sociologist studying teenage communication, for example, might refer to
texts that combine traditional language and graphic symbols.
Texts and New Technologies
The concept of the text is not a stable one. It is always changing as the technologies for
publishing and disseminating texts evolve. In the past, texts were usually presented as printed matter in
bound volumes such as pamphlets or books. Today, however, people are more likely to encounter texts
in digital space, where the materials are becoming "more fluid," according to linguists David Barton
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and Carmen Lee: "Texts can no longer be thought of as relatively fixed and stable. They are more fluid
with the changing affordances of new media. In addition, they are becoming increasingly multimodal
and interactive. Links between texts are complex online, and intertextuality is common in online texts
as people draw upon and play with other texts available on the web."
An example of such intertextuality can be found in any popular news story. An article in the New
York Times, for example, may contain embedded tweets from Twitter, links to outside articles, or links
to primary sources such as press releases or other documents. With a text such as this, it is sometimes
difficult to describe what exactly is part of the text and what is not. An embedded tweet, for instance,
may be essential to understanding the text around it–and therefore part of the text itself–but it is also its
own independent text. On social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as blogs and
Wikipedia, it is common to find such relationships between texts.
Text Linguistics
Text linguistics is a field of study where texts are treated as communication systems. The
analysis deals with stretches of language beyond the single sentence and focuses particularly on
context, i.e. information that goes along with what is said and written. Context includes such as things
as the social relationship between two speakers or correspondents, the place where communication
occurs, and non-verbal information such as body language. Linguists use this contextual information to
describe the "socio-cultural environment" in which a text exists.
Answer the questions.
1. What makes text a text?
2. Can thinking be coherent and cohesive?
3. Is there any difference between a contextual definition and a definitional context?
Task 7
Read the information about two types of methods in humanities and social science research.
Qualitative research Quantitative research
Qualitative research uses methods that allow Quantitative research uses methods that allow the
the researcher to interpret or understand a researcher to quantify, or measure the extent of,
problem (they look into the ‘qualities’ of a something. For example, if the research topic was the
particular problem). For example, if the popularity of marriage in Australia, a quantitative
research topic was the popularity of marriage approach might look at the statistics for marriage
in Australia, qualitative research might involve rates in Australia in the past 20 years, or could
in-depth interviews with people about their involve a large representative survey.
views on marriage or an analysis of people’s
wedding vows.
Answer the questions.
1. When and how can you use these methods?
2. What are the main differences between these methods?
3. What other methods are used in social science researches?
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2. LINGUISTICS AS A CENTRAL PART OF HUMANITIES
Never should an unfamiliar word be passed over without elucidation, for, with a little
conscientious research, we may each day add to our conquests in the realm of philology
and become more and more ready for graceful independent expression.
H. P. Lovecraft
Discuss the following quotes. Do you agree or disagree? Why?
“Philology is a community of humanitarian disciplines - linguistics, literary
studies, textual studies, source studies, paleography, etc., which study the
spiritual culture of a person through language and stylistic analysis of written
texts.”
“Philology is metaphorically defined as “service of understanding”, which
“helps to fulfill one of the main human tasks - to understand another person
(and another culture, another epoch)”.
Basic terms:
ANAPHORA is sometimes characterized as the phenomenon whereby the interpretation of an
occurrence of one expression depends on the interpretation of an occurrence of
another or whereby an occurrence of an expression has its referent supplied by an
occurrence of some other expression in the same or another sentence
PRESCRIPTIVE grammar that we are taught in school. Typically a prescriptive grammar is about the
GRAMMAR "shoulds and shouldn'ts" in a language rather than a description of what speakers
actually know when they know a language. Prescriptive grammars typically reflect
the grammar of a written standard and are concerned with making determinations
about the "correct" choice when there are potential variants (e.g. in English, we can
choose to either separate a preposition from the noun it modifies [What did you play
with?] or not to do so [With what did you play]). The prescriptive grammar of
English says that only one of those is "correct" even though all speakers of English
have the option.
STANDARD the variety of a language that serves as the model for what is "correct" and "incorrect"
LANGUAGE for a given language. The standard language is generally the one that is written
GENERATIVE The idea that a finite set of rules or constraints can generate [e.g. produce as an
GRAMMAR output] an infinite number of utterances, many of them novel. This model shows that
native speakers of a language acquire a set of rules and a lexicon rather than specific
sentences
PHONETICS The study of the sounds we use to produce/interpret speech
PHONOLOGY The study of the sounds that occur in specific languages and the rules or constraints
that govern when they occur
MORPHOLOGY The study of the units of meaning (words, prefixes etc.) in a language and their
patterns of occurrence
LEXICON The set of morphemes in a language
ROOT The main meaning morpheme in a word and the morpheme to which affixes attach
(e.g. in 'untie', the root is 'tie').
INFLECTION The morphology that governs grammatical relationships between words (e.g. the 3rd
person, present verb marker in English [-s] tells us something about the relationship
between the noun and the verb).
DERIVATION The morphology that governs how new meanings are created (e.g. if I attach the
prefix 'un-' to a verb like 'tie', I create a new meaning--namely the opposite of the
original word).
SYNTAX The study of the construction of sentences in a language. This includes the linear
order (e.g. Subject Verb Object vs. Subject Object Verb) as well as the relationships
between the parts of the sentence.
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