Immagine linguistica del mondo e carattere nazionale nella lingua.A proposito di alcune recenti pubblicazioni

Abstract

Linguistic Image of the Word and National Character in Language: about some recent pubblications

This paper is concerned with a number of relatively recent works produced by Slavic linguists, mainly Russian and Polish, that explore the relationship between national character in language and the linguistic image of the world. The relationship between culture and language has always been represented in the lexical and phraseological layers of language, but the works in question identify it in the grammatical structure of languages. This paper discusses such approaches, concentrating on the work of the Polish linguist Anna Wierzbicka and on her influence on Russian linguists. A work examined in depth is a recent book by Jurij Rylov in which he compares the national character as reflected in the structure of Russian and Italian. This kind of study in Russia explicitly follows the so-called Sapir and Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity, a hypothesis that has recently been re-considered by a number of Western linguists, anthropologists and psycholinguists. Such orientation of the Russian linguists appears somehow disturbing when seen in the general intellectual context of Russia. In fact, according to Sériot 2005, the extraordinary popularity of the idea of the influence of mentality on language and of the unique character of the Russian language brings to mind the XIX century Slavophiles, the linguistic Eurasist movement of the 1930s, as well as the Soviet ideology of the Great Russia.