SCIENTIFIC SERIES
“COGNITIVE STUDIES OF LANGUAGE”
Author: V.Z. Demyankov
Affiliation: Institute of Linguistics of Russian Academy of Sciences
Abstract:
The adverbial phrases meaning ‘usually always’ are used with different
frequencies in different European cultures. In Russian spontaneous discourse,
the phrases like обычно всегда ‘usually always’ are often used, e.g.: ‘Obyčno vsegda udavalos’ rešit’ problemu’ “Usually always the problem was resolved”
(N.S. Chruščev. Vremja. Ljudi. Vlast’, Kn. 2, Č. 3). Although ‘usually’ normally means “very often but not always” and therefore logically excludes the adverb
‘always’, the inconsistency of such combinations ordinarily goes unnoticed.
In a large English text corpus the equivalent phrase ‘usually always’ may be found much less frequently than in Russian, e. g.: ‘We'd usually always have these arguments after we drank awhile, and Vicki claimed I'd get very mean when I was drunk but I think that she was the one who was mean’ (Ch.Bukowski. 3 chickens).
The same is true in German: ‘Das Unbewusste ruft auf ein Motiv im Gehirn für gewöhnlich immer die am leichtesten sich ergebende Reaction hervor’
(E. von Hartmann. Philosophie des Unbewußten: Speculative Resultate nach inductiv-naturwissenschaftlicher Methode, 1869).
Still less frequent are such phrases in French: ‘Les engelures qui attaquent le nez, y laissent souvent une impression qui change la physionomie le reste de la vie; et les mains qui en ont essuyé de fortes, s'en ressentent ordinairement toujours’ (M. Tissot. Avis au peuple sur sa santé: T. 2).
The paper deals with an interpretative explanation of the phenomenon in question.
Keywords: interpretative approach; cognitive linguistics; logically inconsistent sentence; contrastive analysis of Russian and English, German and French; ‘time’ vs. ‘eternity’ in Russian and in West-European languages