Figures of Identity

Human cognition, as viewed by linguistics, can be defined as recurring acts of lingual identification of what we perceive. By naming objects (phenomena, processes, and properties of reality), we identify them, i.e. search for classes in which to place them, recalling the names of classes already known to us.

There are two varieties of lingual identification. It is either active, i.e. making the aim of a communicative performance as in This is a table implying: "what you and I perceive at the moment is a material object, the shape, size, potential and/or actual functions of which permit me to put it, as an individual example, in the class of furniture collectively associated (by English speakers) with the sound combination [teibl], spelt table" The lingual identification may be called passive, presumed or granted when several notional words follow one another without any special communicative emphasis on most of them; the emphatic communicative stress marks usually only one word or word-group of the utterance: A tall young man wearing a grey suit was silent. As can easily be guessed, only the concluding two words (was silent) perform the act of identification; the preceding eight may contain important information, yet they are presented to the reader as something self-evident, or ready-made, as a block of notions already identified.

Forms of active identification include statements actively expressing acts of claiming the identity, the equality of two notions (1). Identity implied is to be found in certain cases of the use of synonyms and synonymous expressions (2).

1. Simile, i.e. imaginative comparison. This is an explicit statement of partial identity (affinity, likeness, similarity) of two objects. The word identity is only applicable to certain features of the objects compared: in fact, the objects cannot be identical; they are only similar, they resemble each other due to some identical features.

Hence, the general formula for the simile includes the symbols of the object named, the object being used to name, as well as the element expressing the comparative juxtaposition of the two: the words like, as and their equivalents.

N₁ is like N₂, where N₁ is called in Latin 'primum comparationis', N₂, 'secundum comparationis' (i.e. the first and the second members of comparison).

2. Synonymous replacements. This term goes back to the classification of the use of synonyms proposed by M.D. Kuznets in a paper on synonyms in English as early as 1947.⁴ She aptly remarked that on the whole, synonyms are used in actual texts for two different reasons. One of them is to avoid monotonous repetition of the same word in a sentence or a sequence of sentences. E.g.:

"The little boy was crying. It was the child's usual time for going to bed, but no one paid attention to the kid."

(Cf.: "The little boy... It was the boy's... attention to the boy.") The other purpose of co-occurrence of synonyms in a text, according to Kuznets, is to make the description as exhaustive as possible under the circumstances, to provide additional shades of the meaning intended:

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 1443