Статус и узус общественно-политического термина в аспекте культуры речи

МОКСЛО КАЛБОС КУЛТУРОС ИР ТЕРМИНОЛОГИЈОС ПРОБЛЕМОС LIETUVIŲ KALBOTYROS KLAUSIMAI, XXIV (1985) ТАМИЛА ИВАНОВНА ПАНЬКО STATUS AND USAGE OF A SOCIO-POLITICAL TERM IN THE ASPECT OF SPEECH CULTURE The world-view character of the social sciences and their social role in the development of society are naturally reflected in their terminology. Ideological essence is the determining principle behind the systemic organization of socio-political terminology. An ideologeme is an integral component of the semantics of a socio-political term. By virtue of their social function, most socio-political terms gradually become an organic part of the language and, even with some degree of determinologization, do not lose their conceptual essence. Many socio-political terms simultaneously express concepts belonging to socialist and capitalist formations (the same phonetic-morphological structure, one ideological concept uniting them, but different definitions). We classify phenomena of this kind as terminological polysemy. Terms with the same phonetic-morphological structure that occur in ideologically different terminological systems (Marxist-Leninist and bourgeois) are regarded as conceptual-ideological homonyms. Hence, only a clear definition of terms as components of an integral system united by a political credo ensures their correct use in terms of scientific precision, political orientation, and speech culture. It is common knowledge that scientific discourse must meet the requirements of clarity, precision, concision, and unambiguity, precluding divergent interpretations. Scientific reliability, depth, and evidential rigor depend to a great extent on the competent and precise use of scientific terminology, which fosters accurate representation and precise understanding. The systematization of scientific knowledge requires the systematization of terminological systems and their unification so as to bring them into closer alignment with the essence of concepts, the principle of systematicity, the structure of the national language, and the principle of internationalization. As an extensive part of the literary language’s vocabulary, continually replenishing and enriching it, socio-political terminology has distinctive characteristics of its own; nevertheless, its formation and development are subject to the general laws and norms of language. The development of socio-political terminology provides compelling evidence of the interaction between the national and the international 111 in language, and of the dialectical transition of the international into the national. Although internationalisms constitute a significant proportion of national terminological systems, they do not deprive them of their distinctiveness, since they acquire a national character in each language and, in the national terminologies of the social sciences, serve as active motivating bases for the formation of national derivatives and complex and compound terms. Cf.: party — party-related, partisanship, party bureau, party group, party discipline, party assignment, etc. Thus, the study of socio-political terms from the perspective of speech culture is possible only if the relationship between the international and the national is taken into account. First of all, we have in mind doublet pairs of terms, one of which is an internationalism: deposits — investments, thesaurization — hoarding — accumulation, realization — sale, inflation — depreciation, profit — earnings, export — removal, etc. Some pairs of this kind cannot be called doublets. For example, the meaning of the term penalty is broader than that of the borrowed terms late-payment interest and fine. The latter two stand in a hyponymic relation of symmetry to the hyperonym penalty. The meaning of the international term tax is broader than that of the international term excise, which stands in a hyponymic relation of symmetry with the term duty. The international term investment is a hyponym in relation to the term investment. A borrowed international term often has an advantage over a national term in expressiveness, compactness, and unambiguity, and thus corresponds more closely to the scientific concept. Cf.: emigration — relocation, embargo — ban, emission — issuance, realization — sale, competition — rivalry, convention — agreement, coordination — harmonization, reparation — compensation. In such cases, preference should be given to the international term. National multiword terms serve as equivalents for many international single-word terms, for example: mortgage — loan secured by immovable property; free trade — policy of free (duty-free) trade; devaluation — decline in the exchange rate, depreciation of currency; crisis — economic downturn, etc. Thus, the study of the socio-political terminology of national languages is possible only if its international components are taken into account, particularly those that form the basis for branching out into microsystems of terms—the most active factor in enriching socio-political terminology at the present stage, especially when an international term is characterized by greater derivational flexibility than a national term: import — importer, to import, imported, importing; thesaurization — hoarding, hoarded, to hoard, to accumulate, etc. The unification of socio-political terminology requires selecting the term that most closely corresponds to what it designates— 112 …understandable. But in the case of bilingualism, under conditions in which opposing tendencies are equally at work—the tendency toward maximum conformity with the structure of the national language and the tendency toward internationalization—this is not so easy to do. Some synonymous terms, including doublet pairs, have become so firmly embedded in the system that to speak of bringing it into order by eliminating one of the synonymous terms is to disregard the laws governing language development. The status of a sociopolitical term: clarity, theoretical grounding, adequacy to the concept, and systematicity predetermined by an ideological conception. Marxist-Leninist materialist ontology and epistemology make it possible to interpret, so to speak, the philosophy of the term: its dialectical unity with the concept; the conditioning of the development of terminological systems by extralinguistic and linguistic factors; the interaction between a term’s conceptual content and its form; the problem of the general and the particular in terminology; the relationship among material, semantic, and conceptual elements in terminology; the hierarchical organization of the terminological system; the place of the term in the system, and of terminology in the general literary language; the distinction between a technical term and a term in the social sciences; the dependence of the latter on an ideological conception; and the dialectical unity of the international and the national in the creation of terminological systems. All aspects of reality, as V. I. Lenin put it, “only seem to be independent, separate (besonders für sich bestehende). It is only in their totality (Zusammen) and in their relationship (Beziehung) that truth is realized”1. The ecology of terms in the social sciences (the interdependence of terms in the social disciplines and their dependence on the surrounding general language and on the development of specific social sciences) also entails clarifying the relations between the terminological systems of languages in contact with one another: the terminological system of each national language contains terms that individualize it, as well as terms shared with the corresponding systems of closely related and unrelated languages, which gives grounds for speaking of a certain set of parameters common to terminological systems of both closely related and unrelated languages. When languages are in continuous contact, interaction inevitably gives rise to common trends in the development of the terminological systems of the languages in contact. Identifying these trends means, first and foremost, revealing the lexical-semantic relations between their doublet pairs, which harbor a particular impetus for the further development of terminological systems. 1 Lenin, V. I. Complete Works, vol. 27, p. 178. 8 Užsak. Nr. 1007 113 “At the ontological and epistemological levels, one observes the dichotomy of elementalness and integrality inherent in the historical fact. On the one hand, it is a hierarchical formation with certain types of interrelations among its constituent elements; on the other, it is a certain whole, possessing both uniqueness and some degree of typicality”2. The sociopolitical terminology of each national language likewise seems to us to exhibit this dichotomy of elementalness and integrality: on the one hand, it has a specific system of relations among specific components; on the other, it lends itself to interrelations typical of other analogous systems and consists of typical components. If there were a direct, motivated connection between a concept and a term, there would be no need to speak of a comparative analysis of terms. Yet social and political reality (a system of realia within a system of concepts) is segmented differently in different languages by means of formal resources. For lexical-semantic typology, it matters how, and by what linguistic means, a particular system of concepts is expressed. This question is one of the most important in the study of terminological systems on linguistic grounds. The unity of the semantic organization of sociopolitical terminology is based on specific correlations among synonymic, hyponymic, antonymic, conversive, and certain other types of relations involving complementarity, agentivity, and incompatibility. We believe that all these categories are conventional and relative in nature, dependent on the researcher’s conception, but not bearing on their ontology. Correlation in sociopolitical terminology can be discussed only within the bounds of a single ideological conception, bearing in mind that the first-level “yes”—“no” dichotomy is not always sufficient. The social significance of sociopolitical terms entails control over their creation and use, but such control leads to genuinely scientific results only when exercised by that part of society whose interests coincide with the course of historical development and therefore call for objective knowledge. A system of terms is the result of the activity of human consciousness, but an individual may interpret the same social phenomena in different ways, thereby producing different classifications. This subjective human activity as a factor in the semantic evolution of words must be taken especially into account when studying terminology that expresses sociopolitical concepts. Thus, changes in the relations among terms in the social sciences 2 Ukolova, V. I. The Historical Fact as a System.—In: The Systems Method and Contemporary Science. Novosibirsk, 1972, issue 2, p. 148. 114 is determined by the interaction of factors of an objective order (socio-political and socio-economic relations) and subjective factors (the classifying activity of human consciousness). Ultimately, newly coined socio-political terms are accepted or rejected by society, and the extralinguistic factor—the struggle of ideas—plays a decisive role in this. In our time, when anti-communists among bourgeois and social-reformist theoreticians have not laid down their arms but are launching increasingly furious attacks on the foundations of socialism, defending the institutions of capitalism, the task of Marxist-Leninist scholarship is to expose the hostile meaning of their theoretical constructs, in which terminology plays a significant role. Above all, we have in mind terms such as “people’s capitalism,” “the welfare state”, with which contemporary bourgeois ideologues conceal the old essence of imperialism, with all its vices and contradictions. Undoubtedly, terms such as proletariat, communism, working class, competition, imperialism are used with different conceptual meanings in Marxist and bourgeois literature, revealing the class character of a publication. This fact often poses difficulties in translation: a lack of clear understanding of the conceptual meaning of basic socio-political terms leads to the mere substitution of their formal equivalents, which either distorts the meaning of the literature being translated altogether or misleads the reader about the author’s true position, obscuring the author’s political and party affiliation. Thus, the class-evaluative aspect comes into play both in the creation of terms in the social sciences and in their use. Hence the need to take account of the ideologemic homonymy of social-science terms and, above all, to bear it in mind in the translation process. It is generally accepted that a term’s usage is stylistically neutral. Some qualifications are required in this regard for socio-political terms. The starting point is that the struggle of ideas affects the formation and functioning of socio-political terms. Socio-political terms perform a cognitive-accumulative function in accordance with the ideological conception that unites the corresponding concepts; this is what distinguishes them from technical terminology. But if a socio-political term carries an ideological charge and ideological expressiveness, can we speak of its semantic neutrality? This question appears to be debatable. We believe that the linguistic and speech status of a socio-political term should be distinguished. Within its system, it is stylistically neutral; in context, its specific meaning may change, thereby— 115 acquiring emotional nuances. In such cases, the meaning of a term consists of signifying semantics (the cognitive component) and an expressive seme. Despite its functional meanings, a socio-political term retains its scientific substance. V. I. Lenin’s journalistic writings offer interesting examples of terms used with an expressive component. He often uses the term bourgeoisie with emotionally disparaging verbs shuffles, slinks (“The revolution is moving forward, and the bourgeoisie shuffles along behind it,” vol. 36, p. 151), and adjectives treacherous, cunning, unstable, which add new semes to the term’s central sememe, corresponding to the concept, without changing its scientific substance. Determinologization is a separate matter. It is undoubtedly characteristic of all terminological systems, including the socio-political one, and represents one of the active ways in which general vocabulary branches out. The specific nature of the representation of social phenomena by linguistic signs lies in the fact that one of the components of the epistemological situation—the knowing subject, in fixing the object of cognition (objective reality) in a linguistic sign (a term)—is not always interested in reflecting its true essence. Hence the emergence of terms that veil the essence of the concepts they designate. A class-based approach to interpreting them is therefore necessary. In our view, the use of socio-political terms should be distinguished from their perception. The point is that terms in journalism, the press, and belles-lettres, while used in their genuinely scientific meaning, may be perceived differently by readers. The degree to which the terminological precision of socio-political designations is understood increases as knowledge of society spreads. Thus, in language: a clear definition is a necessary condition for a term to become a component of a particular terminological system; in speech: the preservation of the essence of meaning, and pejoration as a result of connotative conditioning. We see the main principles governing the functioning of socio-political terminology as follows: the greatest possible correspondence between a term and its concept; clarification, where necessary, by means of definitions or glosses; and the greatest possible use of terms of the same type to express concepts of the same type. The duality of the communicative function of socio-political terminology—its orientation not only toward satisfying internal, national communication but also toward external, international communication—as one aspect of the functional convergence of languages aimed at equalizing their status under the conditions of the scientific and technological revolution, is continually increasing. Philological-ideological aspect is- 116 The study of socio-political terms presupposes the further identification and examination of contemporary processes in the development and functioning of the socio-political terminology of national languages in a broad international context, both in terms of functioning and in terms of speech culture. It is much more difficult to discuss the codification of socio-political terminology than that of technical terminology. This is due to its social-science character and its widespread use in public life. In the process of language planning and the formation of a common terminological fund of languages, the main focus in evaluating socio-political terms should be on their informational convenience, ideological clarity, conformity with the principle of internationalization, and relationship to general notions of literary-language norms.