Perception Of Beauty In English-Speaking Culture

Abstract

The concept of "beauty" exists in any culture, being one of the cultural universals, but understanding of beauty, criteria of beauty, attitude to it is specific in different linguocultural communities due to perception varieties. The paper is devoted to peculiarities of the concept “beauty” in the English-speaking culture. Perception refers to the internal process by which we select, evaluate, and organize the stimuli of the outside world. Taking into account the fact that perception of beauty is both subjective and culturally determined, we have selected aphorisms, containing the concept of “beauty” and on the basis of their complex interpretative linguistic analysis, have organized them into several groups with the purpose of defining linguocultural peculiarities of the concept “beauty” among British and American famous people. The analysis of 131 aphorisms about beauty, has allowed to identify 7 main images of the concept “beauty” and to make a conclusion about metaphorical and axiological components of the concept. The main images of the concept are: happiness, woman, time, ideal, something useless, test, truth. Most aphorisms (93%) position beauty as a positive value and only 7% of aphorisms note the worthlessness, uselessness and futility of beauty. The study allows us to state that the concept of “beauty” is characterized by a high degree of abstraction, and rich semantic content. The study of the concept helps to understand the peculiarities of the perception of beauty by representatives of English-speaking culture.

Keywords: PerceptionconceptbeautyaphorismEnglish-speaking culture

Introduction

Beauty is differently perceived across cultures. Various communities highlight definite aspects of beauty. The valence of beauty as a value also differs among people. We can state that culture opens the window through which the members of this or that community feel, see, value and interpret the beauty.

The concept of "beauty" exists in any culture, being one of the cultural universals, but understanding of beauty, criteria of beauty, attitude to it – is specific in different linguocultural communities. In this paper, we present the results of the study of the peculiarities of the concept of “beauty” on the basis of aphorisms about the beauty of famous British and American writers, poets, thinkers, politicians, actors and other public figures. The study of the implementation of this concept allows to establish the peculiarities of the linguistic worldview of the studied linguoculture, expands the possibilities of understanding the system of national and cultural values, and, consequently, the mentality of representatives of the English-speaking communities.

Culture influences one’s subjective reality and explains the reason that there are direct links among culture, perception, and behaviour. Each person is taught to perceive the world in accordance with his or her cultural believes, values, norms and social practices, personal prior experiences, and all these elements are accepted as status quo, are mostly taken for granted.

Perception is the internal process by which we select, evaluate, and organize the stimuli of the outside world (Novinger, 2001, p. 26). Perception refers to the process of acquiring, organizing and interpreting any sensory information. It is shaped by our prior experiences, cultural values, beliefs and socialization, and can influence our reception of knowledge, the way we think and behave, and the impression we form of others (German, 2014).

People are presented with hundreds of different perceptual stimuli. Therefore, it becomes necessary to simplify the information by selecting, organizing, and reducing it to less complex forms. That is, to comprehend stimuli, people organize them into categories, groupings and patterns. Most people tend to think that other people perceive, evaluate, and reason about the world in the same way that they do. In other words, humans assume that other people with whom they interact are like themselves. Indeed, it is quite common for people to draw on their personal experiences to understand and evaluate the motivations of others. How people from different cultures perceive beauty is a simple illustration of culture’s influence the perception.

Problem Statement

As personal perception is shaped not only by one’s prior experience, but also by cultural beliefs, norms and values, it is quite obvious that perception of beauty differs across cultures.

Several characteristics of perception offered by different scholars, for example by N. Alder and A. Gunderson (Alder & Gunderson, 2008, p. 730), give us a better understanding of personal and cultural differences in perception of beauty. Scholars argue that:

• perception is selective, as there are too many stimuli competing for the attention of our senses, we focus on selected information and filter out the rest;

• perception is learned, our personal experiences teach us to see the world in definite ways;

• perception is culturally determined, culture teaches us the meaning of our experiences;

• perception is consistent, once we perceive something or someone in a particular manner the interpretation does not usually change;

• perception is inaccurate, we view the world through a subjective lens influenced by culture, values, and personal experiences, which tends to make us see what we want to see.

The concept of "beauty" is one of the most valuable guidelines and has an impact on human activity, determines the attitude of a person to other people and the world around him or her. Throughout the history of mankind, thinkers of different scientific schools and directions write about beauty. We want to see how prominent British and American people perceive and estimate the beauty.

Research Questions

Taking into account the fact that perception of beauty is both subjective and culturally determined, we have selected aphorisms, containing the concept of “beauty” and on the basis of their interpretative linguistic analysis, have organized them into several groups with the purpose of defining linguocultural peculiarities of the concept “beauty” among British and American famous people.

In linguistics, the term of “concept” is defined mainly from two perspectives: a) as a linguistic and cognitive phenomenon to describe which scholars refer to various terms of a cognitive science (ex. “conceptual sphere”, “information processing”, “general fund of knowledge”, “schema”, “frame”, “script”, “Gestalt”); b) linguistic and cultural phenomenon, when the terminology of cultural linguistics is basically used (ex. “constants of culture”, “the cultural connotation”, “linguocultural element”) (Kayumov, 2013; Maslova & Pimenova, 2016; Pimenova & Kondrat'eva, 2016; Language picture of the world, 2014).

According to the cognitive approach, the concept is considered in the framework of the concepts of knowledge and consciousness and is understood as a mental formation, a kind of focus of knowledge about the world, cognitive structures, including different units of operational consciousness. In such interpretations, the problem of correlation between language and consciousness comes to the fore. This view of the concept can be found in the works of such Russian scholars as A. P. Babushkin, N. N. Boldyrev, E. S. Kubryakova, Z. D. Popova, I. A. Sternin.

Linguocultural approach presupposes that concept is described as "a clot of culture in human consciousness" (Stepanov, 2004, p. 40), "verbalized cultural meaning", "semantic unit "language," culture", "a unit of collective knowledge or consciousness, marked by ethnic and cultural specificity". Culture is seen as a "symbolic Universe", and its manifestations are ethno-specific in comparison with a foreign culture. In this aspect, the concept is interpreted in the works of A. Vezhbitska, N. D. Arutunova, S. G. Vorkachev, V. I. Karasik, S. E. Nikitina, M. V. Pimenova, G. G. Slyshkin, Yu. S. Stepanov and many others. It is believed that the main function of the linguocultural concept is to structure and preserve the cultural values of the nation.

Existing approaches do not contradict to each other, but expand the research methodology.

Purpose of the Study

The hypothesis of this work is that beauty is a complex phenomenon that is differently valued among individuals and cultures; the perception of beauty finds different ways of expression in the language, and has a certain system of metaphorical images peculiar to this or that language community. Being a universal concept, beauty has some common and specific metaphorical images across cultures.

The purpose of this study is the search of aphorisms about beauty (given by prominent American and British people), with the following linguistic interpretation and distribution into certain images with the aim to explore the linguistic and cultural peculiarities of the implementation of the concept “beauty” in the English-speaking culture.

Research Methods

The research is based on general scientific methods of analysis, synthesis, analogy and comparison. The following methods are also used: the method of conceptual analysis (in the study and description of the concept), the component analysis (in the detection of conceptual features), the method of semantic definition (in the interpretation of the values of figurative means), the method of correlation of linguistic and social phenomena, descriptive method (in the description of the results obtained in the study). The interpretation of the material and the results of the study also required the use of elements of distributive and quantitative methods of analysis.

To study the peculiarities of perception of beauty among famous American and British people we selected aphorisms about beauty. 131 aphorisms, which verbalize the concept of "beauty", give valuable information about the content of the interpretative field of the concept under study. All aphorisms are analyzed in order to highlight the certain metaphoric image of the concept of “beauty”. Each group of aphorisms is further divided (if possible) into subgroups, specifying the image and valuable component of the concept. At the last stage of research, stylistic features of the concept verbalization are analyzed.

Findings

The complex study of 131 aphorisms (100%) allowed us to distinguish 7 basic images of the concept "beauty" and define their frequency.

In this paper we present the results of a complex interpretative analysis of the most frequent image "beauty as happiness" (40%). We managed to divide this image into three large subgroups:

• beauty as happiness to be beautiful (35%);

• beauty as the happiness of being a beholder of beauty (36%);

• beauty as happiness to be a creator of beauty (29%).

Conclusion

Our study of the concept of "beauty" on the basis of aphorisms by Amerian and British famous people allows us to present this concept as a set of images. The semantic content of the analyzed aphorisms are divided into 7 images and 14 subgroups, which indicates the semantic richness of the concept. In the English-Speaking linguoculture concept "beauty" includes such images as: happiness, woman, time, ideal, something useless, test, truth.

It can be concluded that these images provide cultural value to native English speakers on this stage of development of linguistic culture. The main figurative means representing the concept are metaphors and comparisons. Multiple variable symbol and the complex shades of meaning of the concept “beauty” is an important objective indicator of its relevance, and thus importance, of value to English-speaking culture. The content of the concept of "beauty" is associated with all the spheres of human existence. The value characteristics of "beauty" as a cultural concept can also be established by referring to the analysis of the evaluation judgments expressed in aphorisms about this concept. Most aphorisms (93%) position beauty as a positive value and only 7% of aphorisms note the worthlessness, uselessness and futility of beauty. The study allows us to state that the concept of “beauty” is characterized by a high degree of abstraction, and rich semantic content. The study of the concept helps to understand the peculiarities of the perception of beauty by representatives of English-speaking culture.

References

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• German, N. (2014) Communication, Culture and Identity in the Context of Globalisation and Multiculturalism: monograph. Chelyabinsk: Encyclopedia.
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• Pimenova, M., Kondrat'eva, O. (2016) Conceptual study. Conduct. Moscow: Flint.
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