Magyar Nyelvőr

Bańczerowski, Janusz: The linguistic image of earth/ground/land in Hungarian
The reconstruction of the linguistic image of the world as a language and culture specific phenomenon makes it possible to gain a possibly adequate idea of the categorisation of the world by humans and the conceptualisation of information thus attained. In this paper, the author presents the linguistic image of the notion föld 'earth/ground/land' in the Hungarian language. He makes use of the following aspects (or profiles): (1) how the earth (ground, land) is seen within the conceptual framework of space; (2) what properties are attributed to it; (3) the earth (ground, land) as an object on which some activity is going on; (4) land (estate) as an object that somebody possesses; (5) earth (soil) as a material used for some purpose; (6) land as a territory marked out for some utilisation; (7) the sacral nature of earth/land; (8) the lexeme föld as an element of the linguistic axiological system. The author is convinced that without reconstructing the linguistic image of the world it is impossible to adequately describe the semantics of natural language. Semantic theories based on the decomposition of meaning are inadequate because (a) binary oppositions have proved to be an insufficient tool in semantics; (b) leaving the context out of consideration has often led to unreliability of the analysis; (c) the universality of primary semantic features remains a debated issue.