Linguistic Reconstruction and Its Mental Foundations (Based on Jordanes’ Getica)

The article is aimed at revealing some peculiarities of the Ostrogothic language of the 6^th century which are preserved in the Latin text of the Getica on the mental level of text formation. This text being written by a Goth who was not a native Latin speaker is sure to contain some Ostrogothic language features accessible for observation due to the phenomenon of linguistic interference. Mother tongue inevitably influences the process of text formation when it is carried out in a foreign language and the manifestations of its realization can be traced in accordance with the principles of linguistic reconstruction. Purpose. The idea of the article is to show that the procedure of linguistic reconstruction can be enlarged according to the achievements of contemporary linguistics comprising the theory of text and its mental foundations such as textual mentality. The article deals with one of the reconstructed manifestations of the Ostrogothic language of the 6^th century, i.e. Jordanes’ tropology.Tropology seems to be most sensitive to mental interpretation resulting in its specific realization in the text. It is stated that the tropology of the the Latin text of the Getica is conditioned by the native Gothic mentality and could have been equally verbalized with the help of the corresponding Gothic lexical equivalents in case Jordanes wrote the Getica in Gothic. This type of mentality according to the article is located on the preverbal level of text formation showing that the author when describing a non-verbal situation selects some important from his/her viewpoint elements of the situation and verbalizes them by means of lexical resourses of the language he/she uses. Jordanes’ tropology as is evident from the article can be evaluated as his choice of the elements of the imaginative description of a text situation. Results. The analysis shows that Jordanes’ tropology is rather restricted in its scope and comes to an inconsiderable in number outer world spheres, i.e. human body, vegetative resourses, non-animated objects, facts relating to animals, landscape, water, few natural elements such as lightning, storm and very few abstract phenomena. The point is that nearly all the Latin lexemes used by Jordanes as the foundation of his tropology have Gothic lexical equivalents found in the Gothic Bible which up to the present moment remains the olny source of the Gothic language material. The Gothic lexemes equivalent to the Latin text variants are represented in the article in the form of a certain structure relating to the so-called language world picture which could underlie the imaginative manner of interpreting the outer world the by Gothic native speakers and Jordanes in particular. Conclusion. It is emphasized in the article that the described level of Jordanes’ tropology may primarily be indicative of his lingual personality, but on the other hand his lingual personality cannot be isolated from the speech practice characteristic of the Ostrogothic language of that period. The facts stated in the article are to be accepted as one of the spheres of the Gothic text formation inherent in its natural mode of functioning since the Gothic Bible being a wordfor-word translation from the Ancient Greek is not illustrative in this regard.

The Ostrogothic language, the Latin language, textual mentality, lingual personality, linguistic reconstruction, tropology, lingual nomination, preverbal text level

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