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The social semantics of Mikhail Pokrovskij and Nikolaj Marr

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Abstract

Criticizing the works of “Western” specialists in semantics, Soviet academician M. M. Pokrovskij (1868–1942) comes to the conclusion that social factors are essential for semantic evolution, while psychological factors constitute an intermediate link between the “external” life of a society and the semantics of the corresponding language. This conception resembles the general explanations of semantic evolution proposed by N. Ja. Marr (1864–1934). Nevertheless, despite a number of common points in the semantic theories of these two researchers, Pokrovskij’s attitude towards Marr was negative: in particular, he disagreed with the thesis of the chronological primacy of Marr’s discoveries in the domain of semantics. The article investigates why Pokrovskij had for a long time constituted an intermediate link between Russian and “Western” “traditions” in the field of semantics.

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Notes

  1. About Marr and his linguistic theories see for instance Thomas 1957; Alpatov 1991; Velmezova 2007.

  2. Here is a parallel in the biographies of Pokrovskij and Marr: Marr was elected academician in 1912, for his merits in the field of oriental philology, but he is now known mainly for his linguistic works.

  3. Already in his monograph of 1895 Pokrovskij maintained that semantic phenomena were not arbitrary, but governed by certain laws (Pokrovskij 1895b, p. III).

  4. While Pokrovskij did not mention Marr in his works on semantics, in Marr’s researches, as far as we know, there are no references to Pokrovskij.

  5. As we have shown elsewhere (Velmezova 2007, pp. 294–295), and as one can see in the linguistic examples that Marr provides, when trying to “prove” his semantic laws (formulated by a process of deduction) Marr could easily exceed the limits of any language families. That is why he sometimes analyzed even very distant (non-cognate) and different languages (such as Russian and Chinese, Georgian and Chuvash, etc.).

  6. According to Marr, one may include ‘tent’ (Marr 1933–1937 [1923], p. 215; 1933–1937 [1926b], p. 342; 1933–1937 [1926c], p. 319), ‘palace’, ‘fortress’ and ‘(place of) residence’ (žilišče) in general (Marr 1933–1937 [1930h], p. 466): in particular, it was the case of Sumerian (Marr 1933–1937 [1924b], p. 153).

  7. See also the opinion of young Mikhail Osipovič Geršenzon (1869–1925) who considered Pokrovskij as one of the most talented Russian researchers and said that a few hours of their conversation left him intellectually richer than a whole academic year of lectures (Geršenzon 1927, p. 61, see also Tolstoj 1944, pp. 118–119).

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  1. Section de langues slaves, Faculté des lettres, Université de Lausanne, UNIL-Dorigny, Lausanne, 1015, Switzerland

    Ekaterina Velmezova

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Velmezova, E. The social semantics of Mikhail Pokrovskij and Nikolaj Marr. Stud East Eur Thought 60, 349–362 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-008-9066-7

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