Relativism and Universalism in Linguistics - Fachbereich 10 ...

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substance (linguistic units) and reorganization of their structural configurations. This is
inevitable relativism since ethnocultural diversity has proved to be a natural law. The more
unifying tendencies we try to establish, the more reasons people see for their ethnocultural
originality, which seems to be an essential basis for human creativity. Mosaic-like ethnic
plurality is a natural form of existence for Homo sapiens, which helped us to survive and
spread all over the planet. Every ethnos is a complex phenomenon having its own motherland
and history in space and time. The creative activities of each ethnos are semiotic by nature
and are reflected in multifarious semiotic systems, which can tell us much about particular
ethnocultural types. The type of structural organization may change via cross-ethnic contacts
in the creative periods of ethnogenesis since the character and intensity of these contacts as
well as their length are usually crucial for the choice of substance and distribution of the
functional load among different linguistic units and structures. A language is thus viewed as a
subsystem within a supersystem of a higher rank, which aligns extralinguistic functional
parameters for the language and speech activities. These parameters in their turn cause a
dominant tendency organizing all the structural levels of the language. It is a universal law.
Relativism suggests that we should study every particular language as a subsystem within its
supersystem ETHOS – LANGUAGE molding a particular structural frame, which only
partially coincides with the general concepts of the four language types. Relativism and
universalism are thus two sides of one and the same medal. It is semiotics and systemology
that provide a methodological background for their reconciliation in historical typology.
Relativism, general purpose (categories) and universals
in ethnolinguistic classification
Trumper, John Bassett / Maddalon, Marta
Calabria Regional University - UNICAL
trumper@unical.it
There appear to be two contrasting trends in ethnolinguistics, the first a trend that springs
directly from a more or less classical relativism paradigm. Culturo-specific categories are to
be recognised and isolated in the analytic model. The second trend, apparently diametrically
opposed to the first, is the cognitivist approach that brings to the fore universalistic tendencies
based on the fact that humans possess the same mental structures and perceptual faculties.
These two trends, viz. cultural relativism vs. perceptual universalism, appear to be in open
conflict. However, it might well be more interesting and relevant to consider these two trends as
two differing analytical aspects of the general process of categorising the external world. In fact,
perception is the same for all humans, and the models generated to deal with perception have to
be able to express this sameness, though perception has also to be conceived as a complex of
differing pertinent levels, i. e. the sensorial levels require perception to be considered multiple,
concerning sight, sound, touch, taste etc. On the other hand the model created in a particular
historical natural language has to be culture-specific, namely, ambience, habitat, cultural
structure etc. influence the categories of the very model. When we deal with ethnobiological
categories, it would seem to be more useful to construct a model that incorporates the two
perspectives and gives them a relative weighting in category construction processes.
An example: the concept PLANT is perceptually constant but is culturally variable, changeable,
sometimes not lexicalised (though not perceptually a null quantity), sometimes realised with
different lexical means and premisses, sometimes in a different relation with subordinated
lexical items. As a general trend, life-forms are seldom lexicalised, sometimes categorially
subordinated items are upgraded to occupy the apparent lack, that, obviously, is non-null at
the perceptual level. Other concrete cases will be discussed (Brassicaceae in Romance).