The cultural phenomenon of globalization has led to bilingualism and/or multilingualism (at least from a socio-pragmatic point of view). This brought to the attention of professionals the issue of the transformation of an identity from monolingual to multilingual. Due to the individual and at the same time social nature of the setting in which a man interacts, the study of the issue of personal identity has to be crossdisciplinary. We claim that in the course of this transformation the language-culture-identity interrelationship is vital and a multidisciplinary approach including (social) psychological, anthropological, philosophical, and discursive perspectives has to be undertaken. The paper approaches the issue of a multilingual’s identity through the prism of the four perspectives and in doing so offers justification for the above claim.

In contact with foreign environment, the encounter of two (or more) cultures is common in situations with an incompatible cultural aspect. A typical example is T-V distinction. In most languages, mainly European ones, conveying social deixis oscillates between two poles: T and V forms. Present-day English is the only mainstream language with the absence of morphological markers for conveying T/V relationships. The present research examines the concept of expressing social distance in Slovak and in English, languages respectively having and lacking overt T/V markers, in order to specify the distinctiveness of English vs. Slovak lingua-cultural identity and/or discursive practice of the respective culture with regard to expressing social distance. This is done in two steps. Firstly, the underlying concepts (a lingua-cultural identity, social distance, T/V forms) are studied by means of the conceptualizing scheme (Kačmárová, Bilá, Vaňková 2018); its essence lies in accounting for and in aligning four sub-processes: frame establishment, encoding (pre-understanding), contextualization (salience), and code configuration. The conceptualization process utilized a set of principles (adopted from Clyne, Norrby & Warren 2009). Secondly, based on the theoretical results, the questionnaires were designed. The questions for native speakers of Slovak examined the preferences in the usage of T vs. V forms; the questions for native speakers of English examined the preferences in the usage of informal vs. formal ways of communication. The present study indicates that the conceptualizing process may as well be of hierarchical nature. Thus, the mere conceptualization of T vs. V or informal vs. formal may emanate from the conceptualization of social distance in terms of a set of principles, the conceptualization of the specific principle in terms of the relationship types, the conceptualization of the relationship type in terms of a specific culture and the conceptualization of a culture-specific relationship type through language means (T or V).

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