The ethnolinguistic school of Lublin and Anglo-American cognitive linguistics

Abstract

Jerzy Bartmiñski and his team have developed, over the last 30-40 years, a distinc tive cognitive-linguistic approach to the study of language in its cultural context -an approach which I will refer to, in this introduction, as the 'Ethnolinguistic School of Lublin (Zinken, 2004a).This work is well known in the international Russian-speaking academic discourse of the humanities in Eastern Europe.It is represented by an inter national journal, Etnolingwistyka, which was founded by Bartmiñski and has been published annually since 1988.The list of publications of Jerzy Bartmiñski alone runs to about 400 entries.1However, this work has not until now been available in English.The present book makes some of Bartmiñski s key papers accessible to an English-reading audience for the first time.Most chapters are revised versions of the original publications, others have been written specifically for this volume (cf.'Original sources of papers').This book appears in a series dedicated to ' Advances in cognitive linguistics' .The 'advance' to which the Ethnolinguistic School of Lublin can contribute concerns the systematic consideration of speakers' socio-cultural situatedness in the linguistic analysis of meaning and understanding.This is an issue that has received considerable attention in cognitive linguistics in recent years (e.g., Frank, Dirven, Ziemke, and Bernárdez, 2008).The substantial convergences between the Ethnolinguistic School of Lublin and Anglo-American cognitive linguistics make me optimistic about the chances of such a contribution.It is the aim of this introductory chapter to outline some of those convergences, and to sketch some of the distinctive characteristics of Bartmiñski's cognitive ethnolinguistics.The work of the Ethnolinguistic School of Lublin has its roots in Bartmiñski's research on the folk variety of Polish (Bartmiñski, 1973), which combined the dialectological and stylistic description of the phonetics, morphology, vocabulary and syntax of folk poetic texts.From this very beginning, Bartmiñski's work has always been grounded in close analyses of a very rich database of ethnolinguistic data, which include everyday conversations, stories, narratives about life and work, and interviews with rural speakers as well as songs, fairy tales, proverbs, and folk poetry.This immersion in a wealth of data is indicative of a passion for the living folk culture in its everyday and artistic dimensions that is the driving force behind linguistic analysis in the Ethnolinguistic School of Lublin.When I first experienced that passion first-hand -in 1999, on a field trip which aimed to find linguistic and folkloristic traces of the bygone multicultural (Jewish-Polish-Ukrainian) life in the contemporary Polish-Ukrainian border regionthe ethnolinguistic archive at Lublin contained approximately 1,300 audio and video tapes of data.The development of cognitive-linguistic analytic concepts in this tradition, 1

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