European and Chinese Linguistic Traditions as Variations of World Vision

The article reviews the reason of the lack of "Grammar" in the Chinese linguistic tradition and "inadaptability" of European grammatical categories to the Chinese language from the point of view of difference between European and Chinese cognitive strategies. Proceeding from the versatility of the concept "model-dependent realism" in relation to cognition, two various initial models of the world have been distinguished based on the analysis of language elements, which were involved in the process of formation and nomination of the basic concepts of antique philosophy and ancient Chinese philosophy: matter-oriented model and energy-oriented model. The matter-oriented model of the world correlates with compre-hensibility of the world laws to human mind, the energy-oriented model - with incomprehensibility of non-manifested Beginning. The matter-oriented model gave birth to methodologically reductive approach to cognition, including the cognition of the language. European "Grammar" searched for answers to the following questions: "What units are there?", "What relations are there between them?" and "What laws describe these relations?". When the languages under study formed up at the implementation of the same initial matter-oriented model of the world, such approach corresponded to the nature of these languages, since such languages tended to differentiation of some units in relation to others and fixation of differentiation attributes by a certain formal way. At functioning of the energy-oriented model, the world is explained as the results of movement and interaction of indivisible elements of Qi; therefore, no questions answered by the European approach to cognition were asked. The lack of "Grammar" in the Chinese linguistic tradition is a natural phenomenon, firstly, because language, just like other objects of cognition, was not viewed as some system with a fixed structure; secondly, any marking of correlation between form and meaning or between form and function is not important for the Chinese language. Thus, every linguistic tradition reflects a certain approach to language cognition and this approach in considerable extent is preordained by the language itself, as the specifics of each language is determined by the corresponding initial model of the world, driving a man towards cognition and simultaneously limiting his cognition. The intuitive nature of the rules, a language is functioning to, went without saying for the Chinese tradition. The modern linguistics also arrives at this conclusion, but at a totally new level. In order to understand the operation mechanism of linguistic intuition, intuition must be acknowledged as the really functioning form of cognition with "model-dependent realism" inherent to cognition; and the key question the "Grammar" must answer, being the science of the linguistic capacity of man, is the question "What models are used in language?".

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