Conceptualization

As the German mathematician, logician, philosopher Gottlob Frege taught us back in 1892, the content side of a linguistic sign has different components - what he called meaning (der Sinn) and meaning (die Bedeutung). This is often translated as meaning and denotation, but what fascinates me is that the two words, at first glance, mean the same thing. And the Russian meaning and meaning correspond quite well to the German pair of words. This is what we're talking about. Meaning (denotation) is that fragment of extra-linguistic reality with which a given linguistic expression correlates, and meaning is how this object is represented. For example, writes Frege, the Morning Star and the Evening Star are one and the same (this is, in fact, Venus). This means that these expressions have the same meaning, but different meanings.

When talking about language conceptualization, I like to give two examples. In Russian we say that the bird is on the tree, but in English or French it is literally “in the tree.” The picture is a little different. In the Russian version, a tree is a collection of branches on which birds sit; in English and French, it is more like a crown, a translucent ball, and birds inside. If you travel by train from Germany to France, you will notice a funny fact: on opposite sides of the border, the same action of stamping a ticket is described in exactly the opposite way. The German word literally means “to deprive of value,” while the French word literally means “to make valuable.” Both are understandable. If the ticket is validated, then it is already used, i.e. devoid of value. On the other hand, until it is validated, it is not yet a full-fledged travel document.

The problem here is that in language such things become phraseologized, ossified, so that in each case it is not clear whether linguistic conceptualization influences our idea of ​​the object. Well, really, what does it matter to us that we need to talk at the post office and in the pharmacy, and not in the post office and at the pharmacy? Do we see differently because of this? This is why cases are so valuable when language provides different possibilities for conceptualizing the same thing and the speaker can choose.

As the reader has guessed, I’m telling this for a reason. When the belt of the Virgin Mary was exhibited at the KhHS, I, having arrived at my institute at Kropotkinskaya, heard an announcement on the metro that the start of the line to the Temple was currently at the Vorobyovy Gory metro station (for nonresident readers, this is four stops further) . I immediately remembered a Soviet joke about a trolleybus: “The stop is a liquor store. Next stop is the end of the line.” Indeed, the same thing can be said about both the end of the line and the beginning of the line. When approaching a queue, a person looks for the last one, not the first one. And the first in line is not the one who just arrived, but the one who has been standing for a long time and is already at the goal. Well, or somehow made it to the front of the line. In this case, the queue for us is a tail of people who line up one after another. But you can think differently: a man came and began his journey. For him personally, the queue at Sparrow Hills begins, lasts many hours and ends at the entrance to the Temple. Conceptualization, however.

I looked through publications about the belt of the Virgin Mary. They wrote about both the end of the line and the beginning of the line, sometimes right within the same note. But the wording clearly prevailed: the beginning of the queue. And I think that this is no coincidence. Coming out of the temple, many people said approximately the same thing: if you want to feel, then you have to wait in the entire line. And even so: those who skip the line, with special passes, will not work on those. That is, standing for many hours is a necessary condition for religious ecstasy, grace, and miraculous effect. The queue is conceptualized as a pilgrimage, and so it is natural to talk about the beginning of the queue as the beginning of the journey.

And one last thing. But it’s still nice that the standard Soviet compatibility has been forgotten: so the expression “ end of the line” no longer falls spontaneously from hot lips like a night hawk.

Irina Levontina