On the term of «language personality»: origin, problems, outlooks

One of the fundamental terms of the anthropological linguistics - the languagepersonality - has been widely used today, at the same time it has been backing at the unique treatment The origin of the word combination «language personality» goes back to the works by J.L. Weisgerbergand V.V. Vinogradov (the 30s of the XX c.), where it didnt use to be a definite term anddidnt have any interpretation.The foundations of the modern idea of the language personality were put forward by G.I. Boginand Yu.N. Karaulov (the 80s, XX c.). They offered three basic definitions which comprised the essentialkey elements of the phenomena: the class component, the degree of generalization of the objectunder the investigation and, in the end, the domain of the analysis, from the authors point of view.The investigation of the 90s XX c. and the early XXI c. shows the modifications of these elements,which had been defined by the founders of the language personality theory.As a class component in different works there exist the ideas of «a person», «a set of speaking abilities»,«a personality», «the self», «an individual», «a native speaker», «a system or a set of mans attributes».Depending on the abstraction level of investigation the treatment of the language personality isassociated not only with a real native speaker, but also with a modeled being, a science abstraction - ageneralized speaker of a language and the narrower incorporated group of people as well as the humanityas a whole.The various interpretations of the term «the language personality» definitely arose due to the recentbranches descended from the conventional linguistics: linguadidactics, linguaculturology, cognitivelinguistics, communication linguistics and linguapersonology.A lot of the interpretations of the notion show, on the one hand - the development of polysemia,on the other hand - a trend for eliminating it as an undesirable phenomenon in the terminology. So farthe derivative terms (in which under the similar sound image we quite often have different meanings)do not readily settle down and the original term «the language personality» keeps the semantic variability.The state of affairs can be considered both in terms of the antinomination of the original objectspresented in the word combination in question (the unity and antithesis of the language / speech,the social and individual nature of a person) and as the uncompleted terminological system in the newbranch of the scientific knowledge.In many cases the term seems to be used too extensively to nominate this or that group of the nativespeakers («a collective language personality»). In future it could be expedient to use this term for adefinite person, who speaks the definite language and to fix the term in the sphere of the linguapersonology.For the branches of the linguistics related to the language personality theory we should comeback to the conventional terminology or to work out new terms which could name the objects of differentlevels of abstraction.

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