THE IMPORTANCE OF THE CONCEPT OF ANTHROPOCENTRISM IN LINGUISTIC RESEARCH

Abstract

This paper analyses some indispensable psychological and perceptual approaches to anthropocentric views found in linguistics. It attempts to highlight the wonderful role that anthropocentrism plays in the communicative field in terms of linguocultural and socio-pragmatic aspects. The movement of anthropocentrism has been promulgated as a basic perception in modern-day linguistic research, which describes the human-centred attitude of language; for example, both a cognition and a communal act. Anthropocentrism shows that human perception, acknowledgment, and cultural practice magnificently shape the procedure, meaning, and use of language. This science-based framework highlights the function of human experience in systemizing linguistic categories, grammatical devices, and semantic segments, thereby underlining the inner pressing relationship between language and persons individually. In addition, this paper aspires to showcase all the facets of anthropocentrism existing in linguistic studies because of the significance it holds for cognitive linguistics, semantics, linguocultural pragmatics, and sociolinguistics. The cognitive approach in terms of science humans cannot escape either from describing and classifying the world, which has to do with the emergence of not only certain concepts, but to understand how the world is construed, we need to use certain models of how the real world works, such as certain frames or metaphors, which inherently are human-centric. For example, metaphors such as “time is money” or “the mind is a container” show how abstract concepts are grounded in human experience. Likewise, in semantics, anthropocentrism accounts for the fact that lexical categories are grounded in human sensory and emotional social experiences. Of course, words of emotion, kinship, and space have their own bodily semantics. It has been suggested that human cognition is embodied, and thus this is reflected in language. Similarly, pragmatics teaches an important lesson about anthropocentrism since human intentions, goals, and situational context guide meaning: human social interaction is not only the content but also embedded in language use itself: speech acts, implicatures, participatory knowledge, and context-dependent meanings.

References

1. Aristotle. (4th century BCE). Politics.
2. Aristotle. (4th century BCE). Nicomachean Ethics.
3. Humboldt, Alexander von. (1800-yillar). On Language: The Diversity of Human Language Structure and its Influence on the Mental Development of Mankind.
4. Kant, Immanuel. (1781). Critique of Pure Reason.
5. Kant, Immanuel. (1788). Critique of Practical Reason.
6. Kant, Immanuel. (1790). Critique of Judgment.
7. Plato. (4th century BCE). The Republic.
8. Protagoras. (5th century BCE). Man is the measure of all things.
9. Sapir, Edward. (1921). Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech.
10. Whorf, Benjamin Lee. (1956). Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf.
11. Lakoff, George, and Johnson, Mark. (1980). Metaphors We Live By.
12. Von Humboldt, Wilhelm. (1836). On the Kawi Language on the Island of Java.
13. Chomsky, Noam. (1957). Syntactic Structures.
14. Brown, Penelope, and Levinson, Stephen C. (1987). Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage.
15. Halliday, M.A.K. (1978). Language as Social Semiotic.