Grammar and historiography: Linguistic worldview as related by a historian

Abstract

In spite of the growing interest in the relations that hold between language and culture, most works written within the frameworks of ethnolinguistics or cultural linguistics focus on lexical material. The purpose of this article is to substantiate von Humboldt’s statement that “grammar reflects spiritual identity of nations more intimately than lexis”. One of the crucial aspects of historical narrative is discussed: the influence of the English system of grammatical tenses upon the linguistic worldview that emerges from historical narrative of a particular type, as well as the changes that occur in its Polish translation, due to systematic differences between English and Polish. The focus falls on the domain of time, which is crucial for historiography.

The paper claims that conceptualizations differ significantly between languages, even in the case of languages which belong to cultures that are not very distant; a case in point is that of grammatical tenses and their relation to time in English and Polish. The problem falls within the domain of research on linguistic worldviews, as these differences result, on the one hand, from different conceptualizations of time as an element of the (conventional) worldview, and, on the other hand, from its relation to people who experience time and who talk about time.

The main types of historical narrative are defined according to the criterion of Langacker’s concept of subjectification. The empirical part brings an analysis of fragments of Beneath Another Sky. A Global Journey into History by the British historian Norman Davies and their Polish translations.