Search

This article is interested in the phenomenon ʻtext‘ both as a cognitive and linguistic concept and as a construct in the history of scholarship with a historical review of definitions and functions of the text as well as studies of concrete texts. In the tradition of art as ʻmimesis‘ (imitation), of textual criticism of Hellenism and Christian theology, of modern linguistic definitions and functions of the text, and in contemporary types of texts employed by scholars we trace the concept of ʻtext‘ until the contemporary state of research. Culminating in the question of the authority determining ʻWhat is a text and what not?‘ we face finally the need of an interdisciplinary text model for the text as a complex construct of textual sequences. This model presented here will takeʻ into account the historical, interdisciplinary, and structural aspects of the analysis of texts. We will demonstrate that a proper understanding of ʻtext‘ and its studies as a method is only possible, when texts are analyzed in a process of ʻreading‘ with the background of various academic disciplines according to the here proposed model.

Traditionally it is assumed among historical linguists that language families are the main groups of common languages and their ancestors. Identical structural features of cases of words in different language families such as the case we discuss here and their etymological history demonstrate that there are parallels between derived semantic fields of the similar morphological structures of words from different language families. This claim c an be considered an argument in favour of the relationship of languages beyond the level of barriers of language families, which are usually considered to be the markers of linguistic difference. The following case study of the conceptualization of ̳favour ing‘ in the German and Arabic languages is a case illustrating such a relationship between words, which lead to parallels beyond the traditional language barriers. We are going to discuss here the phonetic and semantic relationship between the Arabic word minnah ( يُح ) and the Old High German and Middle High German words minna / minme in the context of the socio - cultural function of the common concept of both languages entailing the concept of ̳favouring‘. We conclude that there are genuine similarities betw een the words, even though the words belong to two different language families ( the Germanic languages within the Indo - European language family and the Semitic Afro - asiatic language family ), and that in both cases the functioning of the socio - cultural conc ept of ̳favouring‘ reflected the socio - cultural context of the time at which the authors used the words ; in Germanic linguistic documents this concept of ̳favouritism‘ is embedded in the context of ̳love‘, while the realization of ̳favouritism‘ in Arabic p ertains to the economic context of society.

Philosophy has until present time a stable usage of the term and concept of the ‘sphere’ as a part of the representation of the world around us. We trace this pat h of the ‘sphere’ in the Western philosophy and the status the concepts of ‘world’, ‘universe’, and ‘sphere’ had for the worldview of philosophers in the history of the Western culture. We will show that recently European philosophers have joint this conce pt of the ‘sphere’ with the idea of ‘globalization’. But before the emergence of ‘globalization’ the previous conceptualizations of the ‘world’ in philosophy have had a different function than in contemporary political and economic thinking of the discours e of ‘globalization’. For the philosopher it established the reality, which surrounds the human, while the economic and political proponents of ‘globalization’ describe and use ‘globalization’ as a process they are performing. Even the contemporary philoso phers using ‘globalization’ refer to this complex discourse

In this article we will apply a method of proof for conceptual consistency in a long historical range taking the example of rhetoric and persuasion. We will analyze the evidentially present linguistic features of this concept within three linguistic areas: The Indo-European languages, the Semitic languages, and the Afro-Asiatic languages. We have chosen the case of the concept ‘rhetoric’ / ’persuasion’ as a paradigm for this study. With the phenomenon of ‘linguistic dispersion’ we can explain the development of language as undirected, but with linguistic consistency across the borders of language families. We will prove that the Semitic and Indo-European languages are related. As a consequence, the strict differentiation between the Semitic and the Indo-European language families is outdated following the research positions of Starostin. In contrast to this, we will propose a theory of cultural exchange between the two language families.