Estonianness (lith. 'Estiškumas') in Lithuanian from the perspective of Economic Linguistics
ENProcesses are taking place in the 21st century that are altering the role of language and society’s attitude towards language. The virtualisation of the world, the influence of the media, and the processes of globalisation are all driving a shift in the role of language. This has made linguistics, as well as other humanities and social sciences, turn back to neuroscience and a focus on cognitive processes. The interaction between linguistic processes and real-life evolution has two axes, with semantic structure analysis playing an important part on the linguistic plane, and analysis of the impact of language on real-life processes. The economic linguistics approach makes it possible to tie the predominant sense elements of any concept to the linguistic worldview of the national language and the sociocultural consciousness of the actual language community. The objective of this article is to introduce several linguistic ideas by revealing: 1) the method of reconstruction of deep semantic structures – the ‘semantic dowry’ analysis; 2) the method of identifying the predominant sense elements of a concept in the sociocultural consciousness of an actual language community based on the approach of economic linguistics. In order to demonstrate how this method works, the article identifies the predominant sense elements of the concept estiškumas (‘Estonianness’) denominated by the lexemes estas/estė/estai (‘Estonian’, N, SG-M/SG-F/PL) and estiškas/estiška (‘Estonian’, ADJ, M/S).
