Two “Characters” in the Russian Linguistic Worldview: “We” and “They”

Abstract

The article reconstructs semantic context (evaluation, movement, actions, etc.) of WE and THEY – two usual subjects of the Russian linguistic worldview. Monologues and dialogues recently collected in Krasnoyarsk reveal the main characteristics of this opposition. A relatively big number of contexts have indefinite-personal verb forms such as [they] “buy”, “make”, “climb”, “cover up for”, “turn”, “serve”, “locate”, “repair”, “accommodate”, etc. Due to their grammar and semantic realization in the oral speech they are included in the syntactic connection with the personal pronoun “they” – the representative form of some indefinite collective subject. This group of predicates, as well as their closest linguistic entourage, “tells” about the circumstances and details of “Their” actions, “Their” characteristics and “Their” partners, forming the distinctive specificity of the text content. In the same contexts there happens to be no less active collective subject – the author’s “We”. “We” and “They” are realized in different event-based and qualitative interactions, given by spatial and temporal coordinates, where these two “characters” distinguished by linguistic consciousness live and act. This semantic field in the Russian language common worldview is divided into several parts, for example: power environment, professional environment, inter-ethnic communication, sacred communication, etc. As a result, the indistinctive subject “They” developed by the indefinite personal form of the verbal predicate and the pronoun “There” turn out to be only a mask – superficial uncertainty. It is easily removed by the subsequent context and specified through the parameters “place” (for example, “in power”, “at work”), “social status of the subject” (“officials”, “bosses”, “the rich”, “owners”), “the character of the situation” (irrational, useless action – or rightful, useful for “Us”, ordinary members of the community, “folks”, “people”). The grammatical uncertainty itself is transformed into semantic markers of two definite evaluations – evaluations of distrust and unbelonging (often in relation to “Them”) and self-evaluations of rightness and sympathy (often in relation to the subject “We”)

Modelling the Linguistic Worldview: Subject Field Scoping Review

“…Grammatical categories seem to reveal a connection with human cognitive activity, which was proved by the research results (8 papers). In particular, these studies examine the role of the grammatical category of animacy-inanimacy of nouns in creating the Russian linguistic worldview (Narushevich & Bak, 2021), gender markers in language (Gulik, 2015;Humeniuk, 2021;Khuzina & | Review Paper Mukhtarova, 2018) and the function of the Russian pronoun 'I' in phraseological units (Graneva, 2021) as well as the opposition of the Russian pronouns 'we' and 'they' (Revenko & Osetrova, 2019). The medieval linguistic worldview was analysed in terms of its influence on the morphological system of verb tenses in the modern Slavic languages (Shumilo, 2021).…”