Duality in Language and Culture: Values and Meta-Concepts

Abstract

Texts of language and culture have a dual organization. The conceptual core contains the values experienced by a culture bearer while the periphery contains meta-concepts that belong to an outside observer. Such duality produces paired concepts of faith – religion, justice – law, hope – prospects, life – existence, etc. This article introduces a new interpretation of duality – not as a binary opposition, but as a semantically close chain of terms and meta-terms. The authors classified texts as those based on value-concepts, meta-concepts, and a mix of the experiences that belong to the culture bearer and the meta-concepts that belong to the observer. The resulting semiotic historical-genetic method makes it possible to detect cultural phenomena and build thematic semantic networks of language and culture that update the values. This leads to permitted and prohibited term usage. For instance, a Russian speaker cannot say I'm goggling because the action described by predicate can be evaluated only by an outside observer. However, one can say he's goggling because this cognitive scenario presupposes an outside observer. Such taboos are associated with terms and meta-terms.