The SWAMP Metaphor in Characteristics of Society

Abstract

The article deals with the semantics of the word swamp, which can characterize the state of human society. The study is relevant due to the wide usage of such phrases as social swamp, provincial swamp, Moscow life swamp, etc. in the modern literary language. The novelty of the study is determined by the fact that currently there is no experience in a systemic interpretation of the social semantics of the word swamp. The authors have used definitional, semantic, and contextual analyses as well as lexicographic modeling. They analyzed lexical entries that helped to discover peculiarities of a lexicographic fixation of the data on the analyzed word's meaning. It has been revealed that the Old Russian dictionaries from the 12th till the late 15th centuries featured only the direct geographical meaning of the words blato and boloto ('swamp'). The use of the church Slavonicism blato meaning the moral concept of sinfulness, immorality, i.e. 'moral filth', was typical of the church-theological discourse of the 17th century, whereas the texts frequently displayed the opposition zlato ('gold') - blato ('swamp'). The first contexts where boloto ('swamp') was used to name the undesirable social environment, in which a person found themselves, were recorded in the 18th century. After that the swamp social semantics was extensively developed. The anthropological semantics of this word family managed to develop because of the base that already existed in Russian common dialects. Folk speech reveals the sources of two derivational vectors in the swamp word family: (1) 'bog, wild hard-to-reach place' > 'backwater, boondocks, remote from large centers of social life'; (2) 'locus with its inhabitants' > 'homeland'. Other European languages show similar tendencies for the swamp identification. Particularly, in German the word Sumpf ('swamp') is a part of phrases with the inner form 'go down into the swamp', meaning transition to a lower social class and moral decline. Apparently, the social evaluativity of the word swamp in the Russian literary language developed under the influence of the European languages, German in particular (via the translated literature of the post-Petrine era). Analysis of the contexts found in the Russian National Corpus helped to discover that the geographical (landscape) term swamp had developed the fanciest secondary semantics of the anthropocentric nature in the book-written tradition. The swamp metaphor is used to characterize (1) provincial backcountry, (2) lesser homeland, (3) stagnation of social and political life, (4) a society with moral perversion, (5) a group of people ruled by intrigues and dishonest methods of competition, (6) daily routine of a family. Thus, while enriching itself with new evaluative meanings and connotations embodied in phrases, in the 18th century the swamp concept gained (under the influence of European literary languages) social connotations that became stronger and more detailed in contexts of the writers and publicists of the 19th and 20th centuries.