Anthropological Linguistics

The relationship between landscape and culture seen through language is an exciting and increasingly explored area. This groundbreaking book contributes to the linguistic examination of both cross-cultural variation and unifying elements in geographical categorization. The study focuses on the contrastive lexical semantics of certain landscape words in a number of languages. The aim is to show how geographical vocabulary sheds light on the culturally and historically shaped ways people see and think about the land around them. Notably, the study presents landscape concepts as anchored in a human-centred perspective , based on our cognition, vision, and experience in places. The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach allows an analysis of meaning which is both fine-grained and transparent. The book is aimed, first of all, at scholars and students of linguistics. Yet it will also be of interest to researchers in geography, environmental studies, anthropology , cultural studies, Australian Studies, and Australian Aboriginal Studies because of the book's cultural take.

A general model is proposed for language and dialect spreads and population movement in mountain societies. Languages (and societies) are ver- tically distributed and often discontinuous. Isoglosses and language spreads move downhill during warm periods and uphill during cold periods. Population movements go in the opposite direction. The ethnic scope and degree of mytho- logization of origin legends correlate well with chronology and vertical direc- tionality of movements, so that even highly mythologized legends are reliable evidence of movements. This model is demonstrated on the ethnolinguistic history of the Chechen and Ingush peoples of the central Caucasus. 1. Introduction. Mountains are as distinctive linguistically as they are geographically and biologically. When inhabited by settled farming and herding people, they harbor unusual diversity of language families and grammatical structures relative to nearby lowlands. The considerable ecological diversity of mountain landsca...

Prabhat Rainjan Sarkar (1922-1990), a spiritual guru (also known as Shrii Shrii Anandamurti) and social philosopher, describes remarkable previously unknown facts about the evolution of the earth and human civilization, and the birthplace of the first human beings in Ráŕh, an ancient area of India. This spoken discourse “Geology and Human Civilization” was given in Anandanagar, India on 28 December 1987.  –  Richard Gauthier, Department of Chemistry and Physics, Santa Rosa Junior College, Santa Rosa, California, USA, September 13, 2020.

DE LA COMUNICACIÓN HUMANA COMO PRÁCTICA CULTURAL COMUNICACIÓN Y CULTURA Enfrentar en términos teóricos el problema de la comunicación humana exige, en primer lugar, entenderla como una práctica social inserta en contextos culturales específicos y, en segundo lugar, pensar a la cultura como una construcción simbólica, o mejor, como una compleja articulación de redes simbólicas (Cassirer 1997 [1944]; Geertz 1997 [1973]).

Wayne Vucinic Book Prize 2007, "for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences." 

Endorsement by Slavoj Zizek:

"Alexei Yurchak's Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More immediately seduced me by its very title with a profound philosophical implication that eternity is a historical category--things can be eternal for some time. The same spirit of paradox runs through the entire book--it renders in wonderful details the gradual disintegration of the Soviet system from within its ideological and cultural space, making visible all the hypocrisy and misery of this process. I consider Yurchak's book by far the best work about the late epoch of the Soviet Union--it is not just history, but a pleasure to read, a true work of art." (Slavoj Zizek, author of In Defense of Lost Causes)

Abstract:

Soviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the peculiar experience of its collapse. To the people who lived in that system the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the moment of collapse it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had always seemed simultaneously eternal and stagnating, vigorous and ailing, bleak and full of promise. Although these characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they were mutually constitutive. This book explores the paradoxes of Soviet life during the period of "late socialism" (1960s-1980s) through the eyes of the last Soviet generation.

The designations of the orange fruit in Indo-European languages very often literally meant “apple from China”. Citrus species were known in the Chinese cultural area in the fifth century BCE and glossed in c.100 CE, but there is no basic colour term for orange in Modern Standard Mandarin. This colour category is psychologically salient, but it is still inseparable from a concrete object in the mind of a native speaker, and can therefore be defined as starting to become basic. This article also suggests modification of Berlin and Kay’s (1969: 6) first criterion for basicness in colour terms: applied to Chinese, a term should be monomorphemic and, moreover, monosyllabic – rather than just monolexemic – since almost every syllable is a morpheme in Chinese.

This paper offers an introduction to 'multiforms' as associated systems of verbal elements that develop in the memory of an individual and are used in text production. It examines these in the highly conservative kalevalaic mythological poetry of Finns and Karelians, where such multiforms become are sufficiently conservative in social circulation that they can become referentially meaningful. This paper looks briefly at general variation in production, variation by dialect, variation by situation and also the meaningful application of kalevalaic epic multiforms in exceptional contexts to produce new meanings

This paper presents some of the same information in the Finnish language "Multiformit kalevalamittaisessa epiikassa" (2010), but it presents a more general introduction to the poetic system and does not open formal typologies of multiforms in this poetic system.

The early ethnological works of Alfred Métraux are analysed bearing in mind his first fieldwork trip to the Chiriguano, in 1929. The paper discusses personal, academic and professional features of Métraux’s ethnological experience, the nature of the 1929 trip and his concrete relationships with the Chiriguano groups and individuals. Next, we analyse his ideas on material culture as a privileged means of understanding the synthesis of Andean, Chaco and Amazonian cultural influences. Finally, the dilemmas and limitations of his analytical approach regarding Créole cultural influence and social and cultural change are discussed. [Key words: Alfred Métraux, Chané, Chiriguano, material culture, change.]
Se analiza la etnología temprana de Alfred Métraux a la luz de su primer viaje de campo a los chiriguanos, en 1929. Se discute el perfil personal, académico y profesional de Métraux, las peculiaridades de su trabajo de campo en 1929 y sus relaciones concretas con los indígenas chiriguanos en el terreno. Se examinan luego sus ideas sobre la cultura material como campo experimental privilegiado para rastrear procesos de síntesis de influencias culturales andinas, chaqueñas y amazónicas, así también sus dilemas y límites a la hora de interpretar el factor de la influencia criolla y el proceso de cambio social y cultural en un sentido amplio. [Palabras clave: Alfred Métraux, Chané, Chiriguano, cultura material, cambio.]

El artículo analiza descriptiva y comparativamente los numerales registrados en las dos lenguas históricamente documentadas que forman la familia lingüística huarpe: el allentiac del sur de San Juan y el millcayac del norte de Mendoza. Ambas lenguas son conocidas, principalmente, a través de sendos tratados publicados a principios del siglo XVII por un misionero jesuita, el padre Luis (o Luys) de Valdivia. El trabajo forma parte de un proyecto personal de investigación de las características morfosintácticas, la semántica, la tipología, los posibles orígenes, la evolución diacrónica y los probables fenómenos de difusión en los sistemas de numerales de las lenguas indígenas del Cono Sur.

Academic Reference:

Zuckermann, Ghil'ad & Monaghan, Paul (2012). "Revival linguistics and the new media: Talknology in the service of the Barngarla language reclamation", pp. 119-126 of Foundation for Endangered Languages XVI Conference: Language Endangerment in the 21st Century:Globalisation, Technology & New Media. Auckland, New Zealand.

------------------------------


Revival Linguistics and the New Media:
Talknology in the service of the Barngarla Language Reclamation


Ghil‘ad Zuckermann

Chair of Linguistics and Endangered Languages
School of Humanities, University of Adelaide, SA Adelaide 5005, Australia
[ghilad.zuckermann@adelaide.edu.au]


Paul Monaghan

Mobile Language Team
School of Humanities, University of Adelaide, SA Adelaide 5005, Australia
[paul.monaghan@adelaide.edu.au]


Abstract

Revival Linguistics is a new branch of linguistics, currently being established at Adelaide. It analyses comparatively and systematically the universal constraints and global mechanisms on the one hand (see Zuckermann 2009), and local peculiarities on the other hand, apparent in revival attempts across various sociological backgrounds, all over the world (see Zuckermann & Walsh 2011). A branch of both linguistics and applied linguistics, it combines scientific studies of native language acquisition and foreign language learning (language reclamation is the most extreme case of Second Language Learning).

The study: The Barngarla language (spelled Parnkalla by Schürmann 1844) is a no-longer spoken Thura-Yura Pama-Nyungan Aboriginal language of the Lakes Cultural Region of South Australia. Most recently Zuckermann, Monaghan and the Barngarla community have launched a reclamation of this sleeping beauty in three major rural/urban centres on the Eyre Peninsula, namely Port Lincoln, Whyalla, and Port Augusta. The presence of three Barngarla populations several hours drive apart presents the revival linguist with a need for a sophisticated reclamation involving ‘talknological’ innovations, such as online chatting, newsgroups, photo and resource sharing through a Barngarla wiki. This paper also examines the tensions accompanying the creation of a Barngarla ‘community of practice’ (cf. Wenger 1998) in a post-traditional Aboriginal context. In important ways, the new talknology poses a direct challenge to existing authority structures relating to the everyday management of knowledge, collaboration and participation. We predict that how the broader Barngarla community negotiates these issues will have an important bearing on the ultimate results of the reclamation project.




Revival Linguistics

Revival Linguistics is a new branch of linguistics, currently being established at Adelaide. It analyses comparatively and systematically the universal constraints and global mechanisms on the one hand (see Zuckermann 2009), and local peculiarities and idiosyncrasies on the other hand, apparent in revival attempts across various sociological backgrounds, all over the world (Zuckermann & Walsh 2011). A branch of both linguistics and applied linguistics, it combines scientific studies of native language acquisition and foreign language learning (language reclamation is the most extreme case of Second Language Learning).

Revival Linguistics complements the established field of documentary linguistics, which records endangered languages before they fall asleep. Revival Linguistics ought to revise the fields of grammaticography (writing grammars) and lexicography (writing dictionaries): Grammars and dictionaries ought to be written for language reclamation, i.e. in a user-friendly way, for communities, not only for linguists. For example, juxtapose Lutheran missionary Clamor Wilhelm Schürmann’s 1844 spelling of the Barngarla word nunyara ‘recovery’, which ignores the English environment, thus resulting in the pronunciation nanYAra rather than NOONyara.

Closely related to contact linguistics, Revival Linguistics changes the field of historical linguistics, e.g. by weakening the Family Tree model, which implies that a language ought to have only one parent. Assisting Aboriginal communities in a realistic, non-purisitic way, without selling them myths, Revival Linguistics promotes efficiency and efficacy in language reclamation.

Certainly Australia has been made the ‘Unlucky Country’ through the historical processes of linguicide (language killing) and glottophagy (language eating). These twin forces were in operation from the early colonial period. In her detailed study of the role missionary language practices in the early years of the South Australian colony, Scrimgeour quotes the following colonial language ideology: ‘Mr Forster afterwards adverted to the present mode of teaching the children in their own language. He, with all respect to the Missionaries, would say, on several grounds, that this was wrong. The natives would be sooner civilized if their language was extinct. The children taught would afterwards mix only with whites, where their own language would be of no use – the use of their language would preserve their prejudices and debasement, and their language was not sufficient to express the ideas of civilized life.  He gave the Missionaries full credit for their talents and zeal, but he thought it would be better to teach the children in English’ (from Report on a public meeting of the South Australian Missionary Society in aid of the German Mission to the Aborigines, Southern Australian, 8 September 1843; Scrimgeour, 2007: 116, italics added).

In the case of glottophagy, Governor George Grey noted: ‘The merchant in London who lays on a vessel for a certain port, regards the affair as a mere mercantile speculation, but could he trace out the results he effects in their remotest ramifications, he would stand astonished at the changes he produces.  With the wizard wand of commerce, he touches a lone and trackless forest, and at his bidding, cities arise, and the hum and dust of trade collect – away are swept ancient races; antique laws and customs moulder into oblivion.  The strong-holds of murder and superstition are cleansed, and the Gospel is preached amongst ignorant and savage men. The ruder languages disappear successively, and the tongue of England alone is heard around’ (Grey 1841: 200-201, italics added). Grey was a strong supporter of Aboriginal languages, encouraging Schürmann’s work documenting the Adelaide language (Kaurna) and Barngarla at Port Lincoln (see below).

With globalization, homogenization and Coca-colonization there will be more and more groups all over the world added to the forlorn club of the lost-heritage peoples. Language reclamation will become increasingly relevant as people seek to recover their cultural autonomy, empower their spiritual and intellectual sovereignty, and improve their wellbeing. There are various ethical, aesthetic and utilitarian benefits of language revival: for example, social justice, diversity and employability, respectively.

Zuckermann (2012) has enthusiastically called for Native Tongue Title and linguistic human rights, suggesting that the Australian government ought to compensate Indigenous people not only for the loss of land but equally importantly for the loss of language. Zuckermann has suggested to the Australian government to define Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander vernaculars as official languages.

Furthermore, it is predicted that in the future the very insights offered by Revival Linguistics will themselves become part of Indigenous Intellectual Property, when Slovenes and Estonians come to Australia and New Zealand to ask Aboriginal Australians and Maori to assist them in their own European language resurrection.

There is an urgent need to produce perspicacious LINGUISTIC and socio-linguistic insights relevant to language reclamation. Otherwise, linguists or language workers would not be able to offer, if asked by Indigenous people, efficient and efficacious advice. There are linguistic constraints applicable to all revival attempts. Mastering them would help revivalists and First Nations leaders to work more efficiently; for example, to focus more on basic vocabulary and verbal conjugations than on sounds and word order – see Zuckermann (2009: http://www.zuckermann.org/pdf/Hybridity_versus_Revivability.pdf.

Revival linguistics would assist revivalists to be more realistic and to abandon discouraging slogans such as "Give us authenticity or give us death!" The following are among the basic principles that the revival linguist encourages in Aboriginal communities:

i. If your language falls asleep: stop, revive, survive!
ii. If you revive a language, embrace the hybridity of the emerging tongue; and
iii. If your language is healthy, assist others in linguistic need.

One day we may invent devices to “inject” a language into our brains. But until then, any attempt to reclaim a hibernating language will result in a hybrid that combines components from the revivalists' and documenters' mother tongues and, of course, the target language. In the immortal words of Jerry Seinfeld: "Not that there's anything wrong with that!"

The Study


Figure 1: Map of Traditional Aboriginal Country after Norman Tindale (adapted from Hercus 1999)

The Barngarla language reclamation project has arisen through partnerships between the University of Adelaide (Linguistics and the Mobile Language Team) and the Barngarla people. Although still in its infancy, consultations began in September 2011, a number of very significant steps have been made towards reclaiming this ‘sleeping beauty’. Without doubt, the key challenge has been to develop a strategy for the reclamation of the language simultaneously and without favour in three major regional centres. In ways that will be elaborated below, this multi-sited, regional or peripheral reclamation makes demands that are very different to those often found in metropolitan reclamation contexts (e.g. Kaurna, cf. Amery...

Some Poqomchi' Mayan communities in Guatemala actually practice traditional offering ceremonies. Through the mediation of a ritual specialist, they provide humans with an opportunity to submit requests to divine authorities for something they wish to obtain. The language used during this ritual communication differs from everyday Poqomchi' in certain lexical, grammatical and discursive respects. Based on primary fieldwork data, this paper discusses parallel syntactic constructions, the metaphorical use of certain lexemes, the functions of loanwords and the unexpected choice of tense/aspect/mood categories, among other features. In addition, this article presents morphologically annotated and translated textual extracts from three offering ceremonies, which may be useful for further studies on Poqomchi' ritual communication.

Extraordinary change is under way in the Alto Urubamba Valley, a vital and turbulent corner of the Andean-Amazonian borderland of southern Peru. Here, tens of thousands of Quechua-speaking farmers from the rural Andes have migrated to the territory of the Indigenous Amazonian Matsigenka people in search of land for coffee cultivation. This migration has created a new multilingual, multiethnic agrarian society.

The rich-tasting Peruvian coffee in your cup is the distillate of an intensely dynamic Amazonian frontier, where native Matsigenkas, state agents, and migrants from the rural highlands are carving the forest into farms. Language, Coffee, and Migration on an Andean-Amazonian Frontier shows how people of different backgrounds married together and blended the Quechua, Matsigenka, and Spanish languages in their day-to-day lives. This frontier relationship took place against a backdrop of deforestation, cocaine trafficking, and destructive natural gas extraction.

Nicholas Q. Emlen’s rich account—which takes us to remote Amazonian villages, dusty frontier towns, roadside bargaining sessions, and coffee traders’ homes—offers a new view of settlement frontiers as they are negotiated in linguistic interactions and social relationships. This interethnic encounter was not a clash between distinct groups but rather an integrated network of people who adopted various stances toward each other as they spoke.

The book brings together a fine-grained analysis of multilingualism with urgent issues in Latin America today, including land rights, poverty, drug trafficking, and the devastation of the world’s largest forest. It offers a timely on-the-ground perspective on the agricultural colonization of the Amazon, which has triggered an environmental emergency threatening the future of the planet.

Abstract: The argument I will develop in this essay is that the foreign students are a latent human resource who can assist with overcoming English monolingualism in the Australian population. Foreign students, properly rewarded, can be a major source of skills transfer. Every one of those students is a walking compendium of language and cultural skills that Australians need to know.

Drawing on an important and newly accessed early twentieth-century manuscript from the highland Lima village of San Pedro de Casta, this article explores the linguistic landscape within which the text—an internal set of irrigation ritual regulations based on Inca precepts—emerged, and offers a highly contextualized analysis of the Quechua word waqay, which features in this predominantly Spanish-language text. The term is central to Andean conceptualizations of landscape, spirituality, and communication. In the local context, agro-pastoral production and community well-being hinge on the deliverance of this word in the annual canal-cleaning ritual.

Atong is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Northeast India and Bangladesh. In this dictionary, Seino van Breugel provides a rigorous, well-illustrated and well-referenced lexical description of the language, making this book of great interest and value to general linguists, typologists, as well as area specialists and cultural anthropologists. Comprising not only of an Atong-English, but also English-Atong dictionary, as well as semantic lexica, this volume is one of the most thorough lexical descriptions of a Bodo-Garo language to date. The grammatical lexica allow the reader quick access to lists of members of the various Atong word classes, collocations and idiomatic expressions. The grammatical compendium makes this book self-contained, while its many references link it to the rest of the author’s corpus on the Atong language. The Appendix of Photos not only provides visual illustrations to many of the Atong dictionary entries, but also offers the reader a glance at the physical environment in which the language is spoken.

In this article I investigate Navajo poet Laura Tohe’s uses of metapragmatic terms in three literary works found in her book No Parole Today. Tohe’s book focuses on the boarding school experience and is especially concerned with issues of language use. I argue that Tohe uses metadiscourses that both dramatize language use but also create affectively potent relations
between speakers and the languages they use. These metadiscourses are implicit metadiscourses. Rather than explicitly stating that Navajo should be the language of social intimacy for Navajos, Tohe dramatizes such relationships. Such implicit metadiscourses gain added import when understood within the larger social fields of the Navajo Nation and current ideologies about the Navajo language.

Presented 8 April 2016 at Undergraduate Linguistics Association of Britain conference at the University of Aberdeen:

Coined by Ernst Håkon Jahr as a sociolinguistic ’experiment’, Norwegian Nynorsk - the constructed written language based on Norway’s dialectal variation, created by Ivar Aasen in the 1800s - is one of two official written languages in the country. 

In this talk, I will present and introduce the linguistic activism which is strongly tied to the use and promotion of Nynorsk, particularly that of the Norsk Målungdom (the Norwegian Language Youth) – by going over their activities over the last year, we will look into how the organisation operates as well as how it tries to put linguistic and political questions on the agenda in today’s Norway.

As a matter of macrosociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological interest, I will touch on the following questions:

-​Has the linguistic activism of the Målungdom changed over time? If so, how and why?
-​Which issues relating to the use of Nynorsk in Norway have been prioritised?
-​Between 2015-2016, what did the Målungdom focus on and why?
-​Discussion: How could the linguistic activism behind Norwegian Nynorsk be of interest to linguists with a more structural and non-applied stance?

This presentation will be a reflection of the my interaction with the Målungdom as a member since September 2015. There will be reference to modern works and ideas in language planning and policy, sociolinguistics and linguistic ethnography.

The bilum, as the traditional string bag of Papua New Guinea is called in Melanesian Pidgin and increasingly more so in English, too, is a traditional handmade string bag, mostly made by women in Papua New Guinea. They were originally made with fiber from various local trees. These days they are often made from imported yarn, although you can still find traditionally made fiber bilums in the highlands. The bilum has been investigated not only from the perspective of its construction (Baker 1985) but also its social significance in highland societies (cf. MacKenzie 1991, Knapp 2013). Another interesting aspect with respect to bilums has yet passed unnoticed. This article will highlight the use of metaphoric language not only in the production of bilums involving the terms used to denote its components, to refer to denote the meshes and its parts, to describe the making of patterns. The use of metaphoric language nicely illustrates how most parts of the bilum are named by body part terms, how the concept of building a fence is used 1 for the description of building a bilum and how the construction method is linguistically described as movement – like moving through the highlands of Papua New Guinea. The paper will address the prevalent discussion on metaphors originating in culture or cognition.

This contribution deals with expressions and conceptualizations of emotions in Jamaican. By drawing on various examples and their performances in public and digital spaces, this paper argues that what we conceive as 'emotion' is indeed a complex and often culturally defined phenomenon which intertwines with a range of related concepts. The focus here lies on expressions of emotions which reflect African cultural conceptualizations. This also includes discussing a West African holistic and embodied conceptualization of 'feeling' as compared to the Western notion of 'emotion'. Moreover, the chapter discusses the multimodality of emotional expressions by looking at examples in a few Jamaican movies, songs and social media. I argue that certain emotional expressions are culturally emblematic and that their performance serves as a marker of identity by drawing on the various functions of language according to Roman Jakobson.

Marriage, whose origins in Poland are not exactly known, is an extremely complex
ritual described from the perspective of anthropology, ethnology, law, history, sociology
and religious studies. Some of the aspects of marriage (mainly the text types related to
it) have become the subject of interests for linguists. Nevertheless, a study that would
contain an explanation of the word marriage and take into account the various contexts that correlate with it has yet not appeared. It is this fact that has given rise to the present attempt at reconstructing the linguistic picture of MARRIAGE. Owing to the selected issue, this monograph constitutes a part of the culturally and anthropologically-oriented trend in poststructural linguistics, which approaches language as a treasury of knowledge about man and the surrounding world.
According to ethnolinguists, an adequate description of the image of individual elements which function in the collective consciousness requires utilizing various methods and techniques that are used not only in linguistic research. The linguistic picture of MARRIAGE has been reconstructed on the basis of three data types referred to as SQT: System – Questionnaire – Text (Polish SAT). The source of systemic data (derivatives, synonyms, antonyms and idioms) were 50 lexicographical collections containing information on both contemporary and former Polish and six book collections (proverbs). The second type of material has been gathered by surveys (associations, synonyms, antonyms, idiomatic expressions, definitions and semantic tests) carried out among 800 students of the largest academic centres of Poland, that is Gdansk, Cracow, Lublin, Poznań, Rzeszów, Szczecin, Warsaw and Wrocław. The third type of data consisted of 700 wedding invitations, 700 wedding wishes and 5209 excerpts from approximately 23 000 posts from wedding discussion forums. The additional material came from the specialist and how-to press and the National Corpus of Polish. In order to construe a many-sided description that would be as complete as possible, we have set a strictly linguistic discussion within a broad context (cultural, historical, sociological, anthropological etc.).
The analysis of the empirical material has helped to identify the most strongly consolidated semantic components attributable to the lexeme marriage. The collection of elements which form the linguistic picture of MARRIAGE might be arranged into twenty facets (within at least six of which subfacets may be distinguished), namely [HYPERONYMS], [HOMONYMS], [OPPOSITIONS], [REASONS], [FACTORS PREVENTING MARRIAGE], [ELEMENTS/STEPS], [SUBJECTS], [TIME], [SPACE], [PROPERTIES], [IMAGE/APPEARANCE], [MARRIAGE CEREMONY SETTING], [SPEECH ACTS/TEXTS], [EMOTIONS], [COLOURS], [PHENOMENA/PRECEDING EVENTS], [ACTIONS/EVENTS], [RESULTS/EFFECTS], [WEDDING CUSTOMS] and [BELIEFS]. The components abstracted in the course of the analysis seem to prove that the linguistic picture of marriage is extremely diverse and heterogeneous. By analogy to the scientific perspective, marriage is classified as a celebration, a ceremony, a rite and a sacrament, whereas identifying so many groups of phenomena into which marriage may be classified reflects a terminological chaos which is yet to be harnessed. The scientific view of the world is also reflected by the information pertaining to the types of the ceremony, namely civil, concordat and denominational marriage (Church/Catholic, Orthodox or Judaic). Humanist and homosexual marriage, solutions which are considered modern in Poland, should also be included in this group. In addition, in broad terms marriage is presented as a multi-step process that involves not only the very moment of taking marriage vows, but also the actions which precede (an engagement, inviting guests and a bachelor/bachelorette party) and follow it (a wedding, the wedding night, a honeymoon and a wedding after-party). This seems to confirm, therefore, that the set of ritual actions begins with the emergence of the intention to marry which implies undertaking appropriate steps to fulfil this plan.
The scientific view of reality is also reflected by the information regarding the
factors that prevent a given person from becoming formally married to his or her
partner (disability, kinship). The phenomena opposed to marriage, including divorce, being single, separation, death, celibacy, and marriage annulment are in line with the scientific perspective as well. We should also treat in a similar way the hints which concern the people connected with the ceremony, that is, external authorities with causative power (a celebrant, a priest, a consul or an official), the bodies that issue relevant documents (a family court, a notary) and perform essential functions determined by cultural or legal requirements (a bridesmaid, a best man, a witness or an interpreter). The juridicial point of view is also evident in the information with regard to forming family connections or to the documents related to marriage (a marriage certificate, a prenuptial agreement, a death certificate of the spouse, a copy of a divorce decree or a decree annulling the marriage etc.).
On the other hand, however, the linguistic picture of MARRIAGE is created by elements
which result from a common-sense perception and are often far from the objectivity typical of a scientific approach. The anthropocentric view, which includes the consolidation of the functional features of the rite (e.g. the beginning of a new and happy life), its properties (e.g. wonderful, magical) and emotions related to it (e.g. joy, excitement), manifests the popular way of conceptualizing reality. The human view of the world is also reflected by temporal information (e.g. youth, summer) and the division of marriage into two types, depending on the sex of the person with whom the marriage is concluded, namely zamazpójscie (of a woman) and ozenienie sie (of a man). The naive view of reality results in perceiving marriage in terms of a moment in life, an experience, an event, or a party and pointing out the reasons for concluding it (e.g. an unplanned pregnancy, love, the pressure from other people). The information pertaining to colours (white, blue) or other issues, including the weddings image (e.g. a dress, a dinner jacket), the setting of the ceremony (e.g. a limousine, gifts) or contractors (e.g. a master of the ceremony, a choir) is not of a scientific nature either. The outcome of the common-sense perception also includes the data pertaining to the phenomena and events that precede the engagement (e.g. sexual activity, getting to know the partner well), occur before the ceremony (e.g. booking a venue, making advance payments), during it (e.g. participating in wedding games, dancing) or afterwards (e.g. everyday duties, a metamorphosis of the spouse). In addition, elements of the former (pagan and Slavic) folk beliefs have been preserved in the examined material, for example avoiding unhappiness (e.g. near death) by marrying in May or throwing rice at the newly-wedded couple to ensure them luck and fertility.
The analyses seem to show that marriage is an ambivalent phenomenon. On the one hand it appears to be awaited, joyful, wonderful, unrepeatable and exceptional. On the other hand, however, it is perceived as unnecessary, enslaving and starting a life which has little in common with the projected happiness. The semantic inquiry also seems to confirm the heteronormativity of the Polish culture with its typical perspective of Catholicism and the relevance of the traditional patriarchal family model.