Adam Głaz

Hubert Kowalewski

Anna Weremczuk

Numerous linguists of various orientations, translators and literary scholars share an interest in text. As students of language with very diverse interests and aims, they ask themselves, if only subconsciously, the following questions: What kind(s) of texts do we study? Why do we study them? What are we looking for? What do and don’t we find? What do we do with whatever we do find? What does it tell us about language, its speakers or the human mind? Generally, what is (a) text for me as a linguist and/or translator? In the present volume, the questions are brought onto the level of the conscious and addressed by several practitioners in the fields of linguistics and translation – contributions with a literary slant also have a linguistic orientation. Although ultimate answers to these questions may not exist, the ambition of the book is to help the reader appreciate the richness of text and the variety of texts as a treasure-trove for scholars representing multifarious approaches to language.

What’s in a Text? Inquiries into the Textual Cornucopia

Henryk Kardela

William J. Sullivan

Perspectives on Language

This book explores the concept of linguistic worldview, which is underpinned by the underlying idea that languages, in their lexicogrammatical structures and patterns of usage, encode interpretations of reality that symbolize, shape, and construct speakers’ cultural experience. The volume traces the development of the linguistic worldview conception from its origins in ancient Greece to 20th-century linguistic relativity, Western ethnosemantics, parallel movements in eastern Europe, and contemporary inquiry into languacultures. It outlines the important theoretical issues, surveys the major approaches, and identifies areas of both convergence and discrepancy between them. By proposing three sample analyses, the book highlights the relevant questions addressed in different but compatible models, as well as identifies possible avenues of their further development. Finally, it considers several domains of potential interest to the linguistic worldview agenda. Because inquiry into linguistic worldviews concerns the sphere of the symbolic and the cultural, it touches upon the very essence of human lives. This book will be of interest to scholars working in cultural linguistics, ethnolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, comparative semantics, and translation studies.

Approaches and Applications

Linguistic Worldview(s)

This edited book explores languages and cultures (or linguacultures) from a translation perspective, resting on the assumption that they find expression as linguacultural worldviews. Specifically, it investigates how these worldviews emerge, how they are constructed, shaped and modified in and through translation, understood both as a process and a product. The book’s content progresses from general to specific: from the notions of worldview and translation, through a consideration of how worldviews are shaped in and through language, to a discussion of worldviews in translation, both in macro-scale and in specific details of language structure and use. The contributors to the volume are linguists, linguistic anthropologists, practising translators, and/or translation studies scholars, and the book will be of interest to scholars and students in any of these fields.

Adam Głaz

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