THE LANGUAGE PERSONALITY THEORY: AN INTEGRATIVE APPROACH TO PERSONALITY ON THE BASIS OF ITS LANGUAGE PHENOMENOLOGY

Abstract

The paper presents an outline of a new personality theory on the basis of its language phenomenology. The basic assumptions of the new theory are preceded by theoretical analysis of the contemporary “methodological market” of personological formulations. The paper discusses the so-called clinical (deductive) and scientific (inductive) approaches to elaborating personality theories as well as integrative attempts of trait theorists to find “the golden mean” between objectivity and universal structure of personality, among which the basic models are the 16PF, the PEN, and the B5. As analysis shows, although at present some universal personality constructions are revealed, they mostly represent dimensional taxonomies which are hierarchical at best. Such formulations cannot be called personality theories in their proper sense because they can be used basically for descriptive purposes – being incapable of explaining causes of behavior or of predicting the direction of purposeful activity. The language personality theory proposed in the paper is based on theoretical assumptions of a different, nontraditional variant of the fundamental lexical hypothesis, encoded in the language which focuses on the essential similarities of people, not on their dissimilarities. Additional perennial philosophical ground and linguistic conception of semantic primitives allow the theory to have the structure, dimensional taxonomy, and quality of universality.