AN ATTEMPT AT A PRELIMINARY CLASSIFICATION OF LEXICAL REALIZATIONS OF THE CONCEPT OF BIRD IN EXPRESSIONS REFLECTING ABOUT BELIEFS AND SUPERSTITIONS: FUNCTIONAL AND PRAGMATIC CLASSES

Abstract

The article discusses selected issues of the initial classification of lexical realisations of the concept bird. Classification, as a manifestation of the categorisation of concepts, grounded in the customary-mythological consciousness of the collective folk subject. It influenced the processes of thinking and subsequently the formation of cultural evaluation in speech and language, manifested in texts with pragmatics not only mythical, but also cognitive or magical. The article assumes that the concept bird has two functions in human thinking: the semantic function of a sign and the function of a semiotic object in utterances expressing beliefs and superstitions. The aim of the paper is to analyse the lexical realisations of the concept bird in human experience by extracting functional and pragmatic classes within the categorisation and justification of the function of the concept bird within the semantics of source texts. The theoretical task concerned the determination of the relation of the cognitive space of the concept bird, understood as part of the more comprehensively organised cognitive spaces of human everyday life mentioned in the article. Texts of folkloric and verbal genres – beliefs and superstitious utterances, from selected dictionaries, devoted to folk oral tradition, in which the lexical realisation of the concept bird was recorded, served as the material for the research. The paper reviews considerations of philosophy and psychology and some linguosemiotic aspects of speech. The methodology of functional pragmatism applied in the paper, due to the anthropocentric principle, allows both an attempt to identify the main principles of linguosemiotic categorisation of the subject and an analysis of the models of concepts about the bird, considered within the framework of the speech experience. The presented evaluations of the function and pragmatics of the concept bird are a way of expressing in folkloric genres other cultural concepts from the area of human everyday life. The analysis of the lexical realisation of the concept allows us to trace folkloric phenomena, is an attempt to order the functional and pragmatic classes of the concept, underlying customs. The author considers that the genres of folklore become, in a sense, a tool of ideological influence on the population, through the inherent reiteration of patterns of interpretation of events that have become part of human culture.