“Nearest” (“blizhaysheye”) and “ furthest” (“dalneysheye”) meanings in A. A. Potebnya’s theory of word and the problem of terminological status of linguistic units in different contexts

Euphym G. Vyshkin (State University of Architecture and Civil Engineering, Samara, Russia) [BIO]

Email: euphym@gmail.com

 

ABSTRACT:

Interdisciplinary contacts cause interaction and interpenetration of lexical units between various professional languages. The status of these "migrants" as scientific or technical terms in the "receiving" professional field is often doubted and depends on the degree of professional specialization of texts, the contexts contained in them, conceptual attitudes of the people dealing with them, the experiential bases of the latter. The fluctuations in the conceptual system may depend on the different types of discourse the concepts could be used in. An elegant solution for this problem was developed by the Russian linguist of the XIX century Alexander A. Potebnya who distinguished between the "nearest" ("blizhaysheye") and "furthest" ("dalneysheye") meanings of a word. The forms in their "nearest" meanings are equivalent to an experiential basis common to general speakers of a language. The "furthest" meanings create less common and therefore more subjective components of sense derived from the personal or group knowledge including the specialized and professional ones. Thus the same word in some distributions may appear as a term, in others it would seem to be a word of common language. There are a number of analogous trends in modern linguistics.