COGNITION AND LANGUAGE (USING THE EXAMPLE OF TRANSLATION BETWEEN RUSSIAN AND TURKISH)

This article discusses the relationship between cognition and language.According to the cognitive linguistics approach, the study of language is the study of language use. The languages of the world vary dramatically. They encode fundamentally different logics and structures. This paper also focuses on the phenomenon of linguistic pictures of the world, and using the Russian and Turkish languages as an example, demonstrates that absolute equivalence in translation is never possible. The results of the analysis of this issue has shown, that language does not “represent” meaning, but instead constructs meaning in particular contexts with particular cultural models and cognitive resources, while translation is the replacement of the signs encoding a message by signs from another code.The difficulties of translating from Russian to Turkish and vice versa are primarily due to the dissimilar nature of the two languages. However,the difficulty of translation does not only exist between distinctively different languages. Surprisingly, even more complexity may sometimes arise when translating between two languages within the same family with much in common.Thus, one may conclude that languages are structuring structures, which influence the way people think, and create linguistic habits for language users, resulting in fundamentally different ways of understanding the world.

turkology, cognition, cognitive linguistics, linguistic pictures of the world