Abstract
The paper deals with the comparative study of archetypal images of causality in English, Dutch, Spanish, Ukrainian, and Russian sayings. The object of the research is the category of causality represented in the human mind as a sentential (syntactic) concept with ten causal dominants ( cause, reason, condition, concession, purpose, effect, conclusion, result, consequence, means ). The subject matter of this paper covers etymons and archetypal images of the causal dominants in five related languages. The objective to compare archetypal images of causality reconstructed on the basis of the English, Dutch, Spanish, Ukrainian, and Russian sayings can be achieved through solving such tasks as follows: specifying the source for archetypal images reconstruction; identifying the etymons for the causal dominants in studied languages; elaborating the archetypal images of causality based on the sayings from near-related (English and Dutch, Ukrainian and Russian), and far-related (English and Spanish, English and Ukrainian, English and Russian) languages. The major linguistic method employed to achieve the objective is a comparative and historical one, including the results of etymological analysis presented in the dictionaries. Relevant methods also include structural (immediate constituents and componential analysis) and contextual-interpretative ones. The present actual language data for the research were taken from different etymological dictionaries and sayings from the languages under study. The obtained results confirm that the reconstruction of etymons of causal dominants, as well as of the archetypal images of causality in different languages enables gaining important information about the peculiarities of causal thinking and psychology of various ethnic groups. In addition, the ability of the archetypes to be modified by penetration into the consciousness of people and filling the empty signs with the data of conscious experience is revealed.
Highlights
The conceptual meaning of causality (causality being interpreted as a category represented in the human mind as a sentential (=syntactic) concept of CAUSALITY, i.e. SCC), based on verteral1* prototypes of SCC in related languages, necessitated the detailed description of the linguistic and cognitive characteristics of the causal complex in the English, Dutch, Spanish, Ukrainian, and Russian languages
The reconstruction of archetypal images of the causal dominants in the English, Dutch, Spanish, Ukrainian, and Russian languages became even more complicated due to the fact that the subject matter of the study was abstract concepts/notions (Lemish, 2012; 2014a; 2014b), though the researches traditionally have a tendency to focus on the well-known names of plants, foodstuff, animals, weapons, etc., – everything related to life
Following Mechkovskaia, who claims that "realistic representation of the diversity of languages is in the form of a linguistic continuum, where individual languages are distinguished not by different features, but by varying stages of manifestation of certain typologically significant general features or properties" (Mechkovskaia, 2011, p.78), we assume that a certain gradation in the meaning from general to particular is distinctive of the reconstruction of archetypal images of causal dominants
Summary
The conceptual meaning of causality (causality being interpreted as a category represented in the human mind as a sentential (=syntactic) concept of CAUSALITY, i.e. SCC), based on verteral1* prototypes of SCC in related languages (as it is grounded in Lemish 2015), necessitated the detailed description of the linguistic and cognitive characteristics of the causal complex in the English, Dutch, Spanish, Ukrainian, and Russian languages Such an approach has determined the interpretation of the propositional and semantic constituents of the verteral types of SCC, its formal components, prototypes identification in modern languages, and establishment of the "in-depth" etymons (that is how old they are with possible revealing of protoforms – PIE ideally) for the causal dominants with reconstruction of archetypal images of causality in the consciousness of different ethnic groups. It is an archetype any concept is based on, with the chain, as Orlova (2019, p.9) grounds from the archetype itself through synchronic and diachronic links with a cultural transmission channel from the past to the future, with symbols and stereotypes building, later objectivized in concepts
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