SUMMARY
The investigation focuses upon the language creativity in the sphere of semantics.
The monograph takes the comparative historical method as the main instrument of investigation.
This method allows to lake a better advantage of the heuristic moments in the information derived from the retrospective historical analysis.The monograph comprises two parts which fall into several chapters. The first part considers and compares ancient and most fundamental attempts of solving the problem of language expression meaning, its transformation and the role of language in the process cognition and world understanding (Plato, Aristotle, Anandavardhana and Chinese philosophers).
As Th. Stcherbatsky, a prominent Soviet Indologist, pointed out, Anandavardhana, an Indian scientist of the 9th century A. D., had surpassed in his works similar attempts of metaphor investigations undertaken by Aristotle and European aestheticists of the more recent past. Anandavardhana hag greatly widened the understanding of intra-language mechanisms of semantic changes and anticipated the ideas put forward by G. Frege, a well known German mathematician and logician, in the end of the 19th century. The monograph compares the views of Anandavardhana and G. Frege on the semantic problems.
The Confucian doctrine of «correcting names» is compared with the Aristotle's leaching on the metaphor. This comparison traces out the common features connected with the idea of «The Golden Age» in the society and language and casts additional light on the Aristotle's teaching on the categories. Aristotle, similarly to Confucius, tried to «correct» the vocabulary of science in his own manner, trying to subdivide it into 10 «names» (categories).
The second chapter of the first part of the monograph reviews the history of rhetoric and its contribution to European philosophic and semantic theories.
It also presents a brief review of modern neorhetoric. The monograph stresses the fact that rhetoric promoted the understanding of differences between Hie language of day-after-day communication and the literary language. Theoreticians of rhetoric made a great contribution to the understanding that the form of language expression may widen the content of the expression a great deal.The first part of the monograph is concluded by the chapter which investigates the problem of thought and language correlation in the works by G. W. Leibnitz, I. Kant, F. W. Schelling and G. Fregc. The pages devoted to G. \V. Leibnitz specify his analysis of synonymies. I. Kant's philosophy analysis considers the Kantian «principle phictitlousness» (aIs ob).
The second part of the monograph particularizes the attitude of philosophy to linguistics, underscoring that the philosophy of language should be substituted by the philosophy of linguistics regarding it as a special branch of the philosophy of science. It proves that from the Marxist point of view «the language» (langue) presents the naturally implemented «speech» (parole). The language, as well as the thought, is not embodied in the living word but is exercised in the word.
The chapter about the experiment in the science of the language is based on the saying of L. Stcherba, a recognized Soviet linguist, about the possibility and usefulness of experiments in linguistics. Author views L. Wittgenstein's philosophy of the later period as «the philosophy of a linguistic experiment».
The Marxist interpretation of the «consciousness thinking» distinction makes us look at the «language-speech» distinction at a different angle. Hie author believes that the language and not the speech does possess the genetic priority. Similarly the «language consciousness» precedes the «speech thinking». The notion of thinking includes two aspects. The first aspect presents the functioning of thought on the subsonscious level where thincing is not subjected to the dictates on the side of linguistic structures. The second one presents the turn of thinking to consciousness («thinking consciousness») where «Language thinking» is implemented in «speech thinking» («word thinking consciousness») passing through the stage of «internal speech».
Hie concluding chapter of the second part of the monograph investigates the mechanism of metaphor formation as a paragon of continuous and discrete in the development of natural and artificial languages. It stresses that the metaphor is a kind of a testing ground where philosophers and psychologists attempt to trace the regularities of development and functioning of thinking and consciousness on concrete facts. This chapter also regards such notions as «problem», «task», «choice», etc.