Universals of verbal culture: in search of a common concept

The paper deals with developing a theory of verbal culture, represented at the levels of folklore, literature, and language. On the one hand, we understand verbal culture as a part of general ethnic culture, including language and forms of literature based on it, and, on the other hand, as a reproducible component of social and linguistic practice. Thus, verbal culture has a depth and includes at least three layers: language, folklore, and literature. Also, verbal culture includes the ethno-territorial (anthropological and geographical), “plane” aspect, namely, the distribution of ethnic verbal cultures geographically, as well as their genetic and typological relations. On the basis of anthropological theories of cultural universals, reinterpreted within the framework of the ideas of linguistics (in particular, ethnolinguistic representations), folklore and literary studies, a system of criteria has been developed for the formation of a set of cultural universals relevant for the comparative study of different verbal traditions (language, folklore, literature) of different ethnic groups. The Appendix presents a list of cultural universals, including two aspects: the conceptual series that form the “plane of content” of cultural universals and cultural codes that represent the typed “plane of expression,” universals in their natural, artifact and actional components. Not only will the research results in various subject areas allow clarifying the “flat” (ethnogeographic) and “deep” (on the language, folklore, and literary layers) distribution and configuration of universals, but also to define the original model itself.

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