DISCOURSE POSTURE (STANCE): TERMINOLOGICAL AND TRANSLATION ASPECTS

Abstract

The article deals with the currently urgent problem of Ukrainian linguistics – translation of the English linguistic terms into Ukrainian in general, and the use of the terminological formation “discourse posture” to refer to the phenomenon of “stance” (“position of the discourse activity subject”) in particular. The urgency of this issue is dictated, on the one hand, by the lack of a specific Ukrainian term for the “stance” nomination, and, on the other hand, by the growing popularity of this phenomenon that gains attention of an increasing number of language and discourse researchers around the world. In this work, stance is treated as a dynamic, situationallybound discursive construct, in which individual (personal) and interactive (interpersonal) planes of linguistic realization are distinguished. The article offers a brief historical reference on the research of stancetaking in linguistics. It also gives a short theoretical characteristic of this phenomenon, differentiating it from other adjacent concepts. The relevance of the chosen Ukrainian term is brought out with the help of methodology of corpus analysis, lexico-semantic, lexicographic and etymological analyses. Correspondingly, the quantitative corpus analysis “of stance” enabled determining the frequency ratio of this word in the English language. By means of the qualitative lexico-semantic analysis the main meanings of the word “stance” were detected: (1) stance as ‘a physical posture’ and (2) stance as ‘a mental position’. Furthermore, the correlation between semantics of English “stance” and Ukrainian “postava” was established. The meaning of the English word stance has also been traced in its various uses, including those related to linguistics and other humanitarian spheres. Such analysis enabled justifying the necessity of the introduction of the term “discourse posture” to the scientific circulation of Ukrainian linguistics.