Situational Designations in "Glossoethnographic" Perspective

Abstract

Soviet and foreign linguists and educators continually stress the importance of studying a foreign language within its cultural context. Accordingly, a new field of applied linguistics has emerged, at the borderline between linguistics and foreign language instruction, that we have termed glossoethnography [see 1, 2, 4, 61. This new area of linguistics has not yet sufficiently delimited i t s subject matter: it abuts on other areas that are also relatively new and as yet ill defined, such as sociolinguistics, ethnolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, linguistic typology (for the various definitions of these disciplines, see reference 7). The many interesting examples adduced in studies in this new area all deal with specific national features of linguistic means of expression (sometimes in combination with paralinguistic means). However, these specific features exist on different levels: there are the specific features of the real objects expressed in language, and then there are those of the linguisti...