Language and culture within the environmental approach

The poststructural approaches are critically analyzed in terms of their applicability, arguments are presented in support of an implementing the environmental approach in linguistics, the starting thesis of which is the uselessness of the human language outside the human habitat. The environmental approach exists as one of the subordinate order in the mainstream of a larger evolutionary one, which is the general framework of the theoretical and methodological foundation of the evolutionary theory. The environmental approach originates in the philosophical anthropology of J.G. Herder and is understood as an "artificially created, adapted world", equivalent to human culture as a combination of anthropogenic factors that constitute an average of a third of the environment. Language is not worth considering as an asset of homo, but rather as a result of forming a superorganic organization form of a population of individuals using a certain system of signs for interaction within their environment, as evidenced by the precedents of rudimentary forms of language using by primates. The environmental approach can be used as a theoretical and methodological basis for the entire range of linguistic phenomena from intra- to extralinguistics. The biological origin of man and the "artificial world" created by him conditioned the dualism of human nature, represented by the binary opposition "somatic (biological) vs. exosomatic (cultural)". The language belongs to the exosomatic components of the homo habitat and unlike the biological information reproduced as a result of genome transfer to another generation it replicates in the environment extragenomically, thereby revealing a resemblance to the virus: both virus and language use the person as a host and significantly change its behavior. The linguistic nature of a particular individual reveals the signs of an idiolect, whereas the collective language reveals those of a sociolect. The principle of intraspecific language forms' formation is the selection of useful means, which form the individual subsistence minimum of an individual user and entire collectives. The basic environmental functions of language as an evolutionary product are the connecting (and demarcating as the counterpart of it), performative and nominative ones.

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