GESPIN – GESTURE & SPEECH IN INTERACTION – Poznań, 24-26 September 2009
Human body in the Russian language and culture: the features of body and body parts1 Svetlana Pereverzeva Russian State University for the Humanities Moscow, Russia P_Sveta@hotmail.com
Abstract This paper aims at introducing an interdisciplinary approach to the comparative investigation of human body and the phenomenon of corporeality in the two semiotic codes – the Russian language and the Russian body language. This “database system (DBS) approach” is to result in the DBS that describes how a human body and its parts are represented jointly in these codes. The methodology of constructing a particular DBS of this type will be closely regarded. The material explored involves Russian verbal and nonverbal units, as well as models, rules and regularities of nonverbal behavior in a face-to-face dialogue. In the paper I shall consider some non-trivial characteristics of human body itself and of its parts and show how they are embodied in the two languages.
1
Introduction
The main object of my study is human body and the phenomenon of corporeality as they are presented in the Russian language and in the Russian body language.2 These semiotic codes are in а clear cooperation within any dialogue, and the task to describe mechanisms and peculiarities of their interaction is a challenge for any linguist and semiotic scholar. Human body is a favourite object of many linguistic and semiotic works. But the interests of linguists and semiotic scholars are quite different so far. For example, students in the nonverbal communication have always been concerned only by gestures, i.e. the main units of nonverbal sign behaviour, and by the models of nonverbal behaviour in oral discourse. There are a lot of popular manuals and scientific articles which focus on how people stand or sit, what kind of distance is between them, how they look at each other (if they do), what postures the communicative partners take, whether they touch one another or not, etc. Nowadays these and many other aspects of nonverbal discourse have become widespread topics for study but unfortunately they have been regarded separately from the verbal aspects of communication. The linguists usually investigate human body and corporeality from a different point of view. Exploring the language they want to know not only how the body is used in the acts of oral 1
This work has been made possible through support of the Russian Foundation for the Humanities (grant № 07-04-00203а, 2007). 2 The author thanks her academic supervisor, Prof. Grigory E. Kreydlin, for careful reading and correction of the preliminary version of this paper, as well as for inspiring support and most helpful remarks on the work.
communication. To be exact, they want to know how the body behaves from the language's point of view, or how the body and its usage in the act of communication are spoken about. Their primary interest lies in the field of how languages use to structure the body, what names are given to body and its parts both in different languages and in different situations within one particular language.3 The joint forces of linguists and semiotic scholars have brought up some new goals and tasks in the field of human communication. The domain of human body and the phenomenon of corporeality little by little is becoming the interdisciplinary domain of scientific exploration. But linguists and semiotic scholars working on communication usually have different metalanguages and formats for the work. The habitual format for lexical description is, of course, a dictionary, which describes the morphology, gives semantic explanations and accounts for syntactic usage of different words and collocations in the domain of corporeality. But this mode of description is not the only one and perhaps not even the most convenient for the goals we are pursuing. In order to provide both a theoretical foundation and some practical applications for the combined semiotic description another format and approach have been designed. It is a database system (DBS) approach that takes into account how the two codes, Russian and Body Russian, deal with human body and corporeality.
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The semiotic conceptualization of human body in the Russian language and culture and the DBS Definition of the notion of the semiotic conceptualization of body
The project for constructing a corporeal DBS was launched in 2003 at the annual seminar of nonverbal semiotics organized by Prof. Grigory E. Kreydlin at the Institute of Linguistics, Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow. The final objective of the project is the representation of the culturally specific semiotic conceptualization of human body and its parts. Currently, the notion of semiotic conceptualization of body is employed across a range of disciplines from linguistics and semiotics to cultural studies, psychology and anthropology. This is a formal analogue of the so-called "naïve semiotic picture of body", which reflects how the body is represented in two semiotic codes.4 And the DBS I am talking about is the computer-based table, or the scheme, that holds the results of the conceptualization.
2.2
Data and sources
The orientation towards both the natural language (NL) and the body language (BL) presupposes that the material investigated should be of two types. On the one hand, these are the BL units, i.e. gestures. Here the term gesture stands for several semiotic types of BL units, i.e. (a) sign motions of hands, arms, head, shoulders, corpus and legs, (b) postures (they are opposed to poses, which are not signs), (c) meaningful glances, (d) meaningful facial expressions, and (e) manners, which are the complex forms of bodily behaviour, such as manners of walking, manners of receiving guests, table manners, etc. The material of this kind is taken from films and documentaries as well as from video recordings and personal observations of people’s nonverbal behaviour. On the other hand, there are the NL units, i.e. the names of body and its parts, names of gestures and those of typical motions of body and its parts. Among them are words, word collocations and phrases describing the body and its participation in different speech and behavioural acts. The sources of our language data are texts of several types – the fiction literature, the books and articles on nonverbal communication and bodily behaviour, the dictionaries of NL and BL units, and, finally, the corpora of texts5. 3
Cf. (Enfield et al. 2006) in the special issue of the journal “Language Science” devoted to the problems of body part names. 4 For more details of semiotic conceptualization of body see the articles (Kreydlin & Pereverzeva 2007) and (Kreydlin & Pereverzeva, in press). 5 The corpus that we basically used for the investigation is the National Corpus of the Russian language, which can be found in the Internet at www.ruscorpora.ru [access date: September, 2009].
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Svetlana Pereverzeva: Human body in the Russian language and culture: the features of body and body parts1
2.3 Methodology To create a corporeal DBS one should have in mind not only its final goals but also the methodology of its construction, i.e various substantial parts of work and their functions within the whole system itself. One of the parts of work presupposes collection, comprehension and classification of the material investigated. For example, the word body in every natural language I am familiar with has several meanings that I can illustrate with the help of synonyms. Body can be associated with the word corpus, on the one hand, or with the word figure, on the other hand, and these two words have lots of differences both in meaning and in usage.6 While describing the corporeality and the body one should understand what parts of body are, how, for example, the eye regarded as a part of body can be differentiated from the eye as an organ for seeing. Then one should divide somatic objects into different semantic or thematic fields. Discussing human body we take into consideration parts of body, organs, but also different liquids, bones, muscles, nerves, vessels, skin, hair, etc. Each group of somatic objects as well as the objects themselves should be given morphological, semantic, pragmatic and syntactic description. Alongside with this one chooses the group of units for investigation and constructs a special metalanguage for their description (or takes the appropriate ready metalanguage if it exists). The metalanguage is the main part of the conceptual, cognitive and terminological description of body and the phenomenon of corporeality. I will give one or two examples of lexical elements in our metalanguage. (1) Among different parts of body there is an interesting somatic object named fist7. Fist does not exist as it is; it is formed when it is necessary but acts as if it were a body part. That is why fist is named form/body part in our metalanguage. (2) Usually linguists and semioticians prefer not to use special physiological and anatomical terms in the metalanguage, such as phalanx or tendon. Instead they include into the metalanguage simple words and expressions taken from the ordinary language, such as the first (second, third) part of finger or the vein. Also, while constructing corporeal DBS-s scholars always think about the general method and its sustantiation as well as elaborate and discuss working instruments for the DBS organization. The example of these instruments I take from the particular DBS “Human body and body parts in the Russian language and culture”. It is worked up by several participants of the project.
2.4 The DBS approach The careful study and complete description of two sets – the set of features that characterizes human body and its parts and the set of their values – constitute the kernel of the DBS approach. Here are some examples of the body features and their values. (1) The feature "The form <of body and its parts>" takes the values that are expressed in the following Russian words and collocations: uzkoglazyj ‘narrow-eyed’, sgorblennaja spina ‘hunched-up back’, krivyje nogi 'crooked legs', etc.8 (2) Another feature that is closely associated with the form is "the size <of body and its parts>". The values of size are expressed in words and collocations bol'shoj lob ‘big forehead’, dlinnyje ruki ‘long arms’, muzhchina vysokogo rosta 'a tall man', etc. (3) One more feature that describes the morphological characteristics of body and its parts is "the inner structure of the body and its parts". The values of this feature denote the content of the somatic object and name the somatic objects that are part of the object given. For example, according to Russian and English naïve semiotic pictures of the body, the body part "back" has bones (cf. Russian collocation kostl'avaja spina 'the back with eminent bones' and English word backbone, which reflects the idea of a bone inside the back), whereas "tongue" is soft and boneless (in Russian the tongue that speaks much is called jazyk bez kostej ‘the boneless tongue’), although
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Notes on the meanings of the Russian word telo ‘body’ were made in (Kreydlin & Pereverzeva 2009). The complete description of the Russian word kulak 'fist' is given in (Letuchiy 2008). 8 The feature of the form of body parts is thoroughly described in (Arkadyev et al. 2008). 7
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according to the Russian material it can be broken as if it were a bone (jazyk slomajesh – lit. 'you will break the tongue'). (4) The semiotic conceptualization of body includes also the basic functions and typical actions of the body and its parts. For example, tongue takes part in the acts of speaking, tasting and eating, head is the primary organ of thinking, teeth participates in the act of chewing, etc. In the Russian culture the body part plechi ‘shoulders’ performs several functions, both physical and cultural, such as (a) holding and carrying the weight, which can be either physical or metaphorical (cf. Russian expression vzvalit’ cto-to sebe na plechi ‘to take something on one’s shoulders’, where cto-to ‘something’ can denote, say, a heavy weight or a hard work); (b) dividing the space into a front part and a back part (e. g., Russian stojat’ u kogo-to za plechami lit. ‘to stand behind one’s shoulders’ means to ‘stand behind somebody’); (c) dividing the time into the past and the present/future (cf. Russian sentence U nego za plechami 20 let prepodavanija lit. ‘he has 20 years of teaching practice behind his shoulders’, which means ‘he has been teaching for 20 years’).9 It is important to note that diverse somatic objects are usually described by different features. It is not surprising then that there are features relevant for one somatic object but irrelevant for other objects. For example, one can speak about the form of the hand or the size of the stomach but hardly about the form and the size of liquids like blood or sweat. Head, arms, hands and fingers are associated with specific kinds of clothing (hat, sleeve, glove and thimble), but inner organs are not. Nevertheless, one shouldn’t suppose that if the feature is relevant for several somatic objects then it is equally significant for each of them. Although it is possible to speak about the colour of most somatic objects that can be seen, this feature is significant for a very few of them. For example, colour is significant for eyes, face, hair and skin, but not for legs, back or stomach. As I have said, this does not mean that one cannot say His back is red or Her legs became white – there are contexts that allow to denote the colour of legs or back as well. But when denoting the colour (or the value of any other feature) of the body part one should always keep in mind the difference between the situations in which the feature is significant, if not necessary, and the situations in which the feature is optional. I would like to put two examples of the situations where the features “colour of skin” and “colour of eyes” play an important part. Firstly, if somebody describes, say, how a person looks like, he usually mentions the colour of his or her eyes, face, hair and skin, for without these characteristics the description will not be full. Secondly, the colour of skin is culturally significant, as it allows to judge about the race and the place where the person lives (people with dark skin live in the southern countries with plenty of sunshine, whereas people with white skin inhibit the cold and windy territories in the North). As for the colour of eyes, it is well-known that different cultures have specific attitudes towards the dark (black) eyes and the blue eyes. For instance, in Russia and the Northern Europe there was a traditional belief that black eyes bring evil, whereas the Italians used to fear blue eyes.
2.5
The procedure of describing a feature
Alongside with the description of somatic objects one should also focus on the description of the features that characterize them. There is a specific procedure of describing a body part feature, which includes four steps. The first step is to provide a formal definition of the term that denotes the feature given. In other words, when describing the features like form or function, one should denote what the terms form and function stand for. If the name of the feature does not belong to everyday Russian (like orientation or mereology), one should also supply the description with an informal commentary upon these terms and how to use them in the metalanguage. The second step is to reveal and explicate the paradigmatic and syntagmatic relationships between the feature given and some other features of the system. This step also presupposes the disclosure of such relationships between those NL and BL items that represent the values of the features. For example, there is a close relationship between the features “form” and “size”, which 9
The detailed description of how shoulders are represented in the Russian language and the Russian body language is given in the article (Kreydlin & Letuchiy 2006).
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Svetlana Pereverzeva: Human body in the Russian language and culture: the features of body and body parts1
can be proved by plenty of Russian words and expressions that denote both form and size of a somatic object at the same time, cf. glazky-vishenki lit. ‘eyes that are small, round and dark like cherries’ and lebedinaja sheja lit. ‘a swan’s neck that is long and straight and looks beautiful’; cf. also the gesture of bow, in which the changes in the form and the size of the body are represented simultaneously: the one who bows bents his body and in this way decreases his height. The third step presupposes denoting the communicative situations in which the feature is the theme of the utterance or even of the whole conversation. The examples of such utterances are questions like What makes you blush like that? (the theme of the utterance is the colour of the partner’s face) and the commands like Look straight into my eyes! (the theme of the utterance is the orientation of the partner’s eyes). In general, the communicative situations in which the utterances of this kind are used are socially significant, e.g. the feature of orientation is associated with several significant social situations: excursions (the guide often asks the tourist to orient themselves in this or that direction), military commands, communication between the photographer and his/her model, etc.10 Finally, the fourth step in describing a body part feature is classifying its values. I shall illustrate this point with two significant oppositions of values that seem relevant for most features in our system. (i) Standard vs. nonstandard values of the feature given. Speaking about standard and nonstandard colours, textures, inner structures, functions, actions, etc., it is important to keep in mind the contexts in which these values are manifested. Imagine the situation when partners of the dialogue are sitting back-to-back. Such orientation of their bodies is really strange and absolutely inadmissible in a friendly conversation though it is standard in the situation when people have just had a quarrel but by some reason or other have to continue conversing. Similarly, the high temperature of body can be a sign, a symptom of illness and thus it is standard if the human is actually ill. But for a healthy and stable state of his mind and body this characteristic is evidently nonstandard. (ii) Constant vs. changeable values of the feature given. As it has been shown once (Arkadyev et al. 2008) forms of different body parts such as hand, fingers, lips and cheeks are changeable, and this property is reflected in many Russian gestures like pogrozit’ kulakom (‘to shake one’s fist at somebody’), skrestit’ pal’cy (‘to cross one’s fingers’), ulybka (‘a smile’) and nadut’ guby (‘to pout’). At the same time the form of the head does not change despite the fact that people can have different forms of head (cf. Russian expressions kruglogolovyj ‘round-headed’ and prodolgovatyj cherep ‘a skull which is much longer than it is wide’). The form of legs can be changeable (cf. the Russian BL units vyt’anut’ nogi ‘to stretch out legs’ and sidet’ na kortochkakh ‘to squatter’) and constant (cf. Russian expression krivyje nogi ‘crooked legs’, which reflects the idea of a physical anomaly).
3
Conclusion
In this paper I wanted to show that if a scholar intends to construct a corporeal database that reflects a naïve semiotic picture of the human body, he must take into account how the body is represented not only in the verbal but also in the nonverbal semiotic body code as well. He should clearly point out the somatic objects he is going to examine and work out the methodology and the metalanguage of their description. The method of description that we employ is the “DBS approach”, the essential part of which is the representation of the set of body features and the set of their values. A brief outline of the body features and their values was given and the basic stages with some important details of their description were presented.
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More details of the socially significant situations in which the feature of orientation is the theme of conversation are given in the article (Kreydlin & Pereverzeva 2008).
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