A Nation’s Holy Land: Kazakhstan’s Large-Scale National Project to Map Its Sacred Geography

This article focuses on the project Sacred Geography of Kazakhstan, launched in 2017 in Kazakhstan as part of the nationwide program Ruqani Zhangyru (Modernization of Spirituality). The officially stated goal of the project is to cultivate a sense of patriotism in the country’s residents related to places and geographic sites that are important for the historical memory of independent Kazakhstan. The authors assume that the real goal of the project is national territorialization, or recoding of the semantics of space, by selecting, codifying, and articulating some symbols and practices, while leveling and “forgetting” others. The analysis, which is based on expert interviews and official documents, shows that this postcolonial process fits into the tendency toward ethnonationalization of Kazakhstan, in which discourse on the civil nation continues to be reproduced at the official level, while real activity is more focused on reinforcing the idea of Kazakhstan as the state of the Kazakh nation. The institutionalization of organizing and recoding the sacred landscape involves a wide variety of groups and actors. These factors may explain the success of the project in comparison to other projects being implemented under the Ruqani Zhangyru program.

SEMANTICS OF SPACE IN THE RIDDLES OF KOMI PEOPLE: DWELLING

Semantics of space is one of the topical topics of modern research. As an essential part of the mythopoietic picture of the world, space often relates to the home/dwelling image. The image of the house and it’s repositions in various folklore genres, rites and traditions were addressed by many researchers. In particular, house/dwelling - as one of the fundamental semanthems in the folklore model of the world is considered by T. V. Civyan on the example of Balkan riddles. Based on this and other research, we will show how the image of the house is realized in the riddles of the people of Komi. The material of the study was the published and unpublished texts of Komi riddles from linguistic collections and archival sources of the mid-19th - the first third of the 20th centuries. Analysis of the texts showed that the house, its elements and related objects form an essential part of the entire body of riddles. The house as an entire object, but more often - at the level of its constituent components - appears both in the part to be enunciated and guessed (denotative), in a large number of texts. The set of these components is in principle universal for most traditions to ask riddles, including for Komi.

Conceptual structuring of the English prepositions between, among, and amid, and their Spanish equivalent entre

Spatial language has been traditionally understood as encoding purely spatio-geometric information. However, much more than that must be considered for a full account of the semantics of space. It turns out that spatial arrangements manifest functional consequences which are non-spatial, so prepositional vehicles cannot be equated solely with spatial elements (Vandeloise 1991, 1994). These non-spatial parameters in turn, play a major role in spatial, non-spatial, and temporal conceptions. This provides solid ground to propose a motivation behind these types of meanings that prepositions usually convey. This paper attempts to show how the conceptual basis for each preposition proposed, is a key component within conceptual processes such as elaboration and extension (Langacker 1987). Such an analysis provides a better understanding of the spatial configuration of the English and Spanish prepositions, as well as an account for the semantic extension of non-spatial and temporal conceptions. Using a corpus-driven methodology to evidence the prepositions’ use types, the results obtained favor the hypothesis that non-spatial conceptions are ultimately motivated by spatial ones. This in turn, shows the language-specific character of parameterization due to the clear differences that exist between the English prepositions between, among, and amid, and their Spanish equivalent entre. The cognitive linguistic analysis showed in this research may also offer a new perspective in the area of Language Teaching. The paper concludes with suggestions for further research on the plausibility of psycholinguistic validation and pedagogical applications of the conceptual bases proposed.

Metaphysical mode of recreation of the city topos: interpretation of the city space of Petersburg in the poem «Dream» («Every man has his own destiny…») by T. Shevchenko

The article reveals the metaphysical mode of the recreation of Petersburg in the poem «The Dream» («Every man has his own destiny…») by T. Shevchenko. The author selects a phenomenological and structural-semiotic methodology of analysis of the spatial structure of the topos, locus and other spatial images of the city. The semantics of space at the beginning of the work has an unclear connotation of the recreation of the city’s locus. The topos of Petersburg appears as a metaphysical incarnation of the imperial evil and the calamity of the average man-worker. It was found out that the city’s topos implements a single spatial-temporal world, which is fixed by the life cogito of the lyrical subject. The semiotic aspects of the image of the «center» and «periphery» of the city are represented. It was outlined the question of the detailing and specifics of the identification of the topos, its structural elements as sense-creating components for the multi aspect interpretation of the city’s space. The layout contains an analysis of the specifics of the artistic and autobiographical vision of the recreation of the city’s topos, and also it was found the features of the reception of the city attributes by the lyrical subject.