Metalanguage Consciousness: Structure and Content of the Concept

Abstract

A narrow and wide understanding of the metalanguage consciousness is presented in the article as a set of metalinguistic consciousness levels, which are subconscious, verbalized and creative ones, and every level demonstrates its specificity. The author proves that subconscious and verbalized levels of metalanguage consciousness correspond to deep and surface levels of linguistic consciousness. The paper is also focused on features of metalinguistic consciousness, which embraces dual characteristics, including ontologism and gnoseologism, intuitivity and rationality, pragmatism and conceptual-terminological vagueness, prescientific and scientific character, objectivity and subjectivity; it describes main antinomies of metalinguistic consciousness: community or individuality; part or whole; creativity or automatism; common or scientific character; unconsciousness or awareness. The ratio of metalanguage consciousness levels and various areas of linguistics is characterized in terms of hierarchy of metalinguistic consciousness, provided that ordinary reflection and ordinary metalinguistic consciousness of an average native speaker are part of ordinary linguistics; scientific reflection and professional metalinguistic consciousness of a linguist are part of scientific linguistics. Accordingly, ordinary linguistics forms a linguistic (naive) picture of the world, whereas scientific linguistics - a scientific picture of the world. It is concluded that metalinguistic consciousness is a part of linguistic consciousness, but its functions overcome the intralanguage boarders.

Keywords

• metalinguistic consciousness
• linguistic consciousness
• ordinary metalinguistic consciousness
• professional metalanguage consciousness
• naive linguistics
• scientific linguistics