A Ritual and Its Conceptual and Terminological Dimensions
Keywords:
'Ritual', Terminological Variation, Prescriptive Analysis, Descriptive Analysis, SocioterminologyAbstract
Socio-terminology, which emerged in the 80s of the 20th century, is limited to the descriptive analysis of lexical units and focuses on terminological variation, taking into account its occurrence across different contexts. Variation parameters are based on social and ethnic criteria, which often results in several definitions for the same term.
With regard to the aforementioned method, the paper discusses ritual (1) as a term and (2) as a concept. (1) The search for the origin of the term ritual leads to an ancient Hindu hymnography. In accordance with the various etymological dictionaries and encyclopedias, the origin of the term is as follows: Proto-Indo-Iranian hr̥tás ("truth") → Sanskrit ṛtá ("cosmic order") → Latin ritus ("rite "). It is highlighted in the special literature that this term is the most crucial religious concept of the Rig Veda and its history dates back to 1,600 BC. Based on this also can be explained the other fact that in the definitions, religious content is ascribed to it in a prescriptive approach (Encyclopaedia Britannica 1771-1910; Catholic Encyclopedia 1907; An etymological dictionary of modern English 1921, 2006; The Explanatory Dictionary of the Georgian Language 1960; Dictionary of foreign words 1989, etc.).
(2) The history of ritual as a concept was initially developed immediately after its terminological understanding: it was considered a leading category characteristic of non-Western cultures and was limited only to the discussion of religious and magical procedures. At the beginning of the 20th century, the idea of secular rituals matured in Emile Durkheim's sociological concept, which in the 60s of the 20th century Irving Goffman turned into a matter of "social dramaturgy". In the tradition of structuralism, the ritual is introduced as an element of the semiological system; A ritual is all speech events that are more or less standardized (for example, greeting and farewell rituals, etc.).
The paper is aimed to present ritual in the framework of socio-terminology and to display the difference between the prescriptive and the descriptive analyses on the example of this one lexical unit. As illustrative material, along with the dictionaries or encyclopedias of different periods and in various languages, relevant collocational examples gathered from the National Corpus of the Georgian language will be used.
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