Epistemological function of code-switching in a multilingual text: The case of the student Vytautas Civinskis’ multilingual Diaries

Abstract

Vytautas Civinskis (1887?–1910) is considered as a contributor to Lithuanian national and social movements, and a well-educated person originating from nobility. He wrote his Diaries in 1904–1910, when he studied agriculture and veterinary medicine at Leipzig, Berlin and Dorpat (now Tartu) Universities. These unpublished multilingual egodocumentary texts reflect Vytautas Civinskis’ keen involvement in analysis of his own emotional states, which perhaps was inspired by attending psychology lectures; those of Wilhelm Wundt, on emotions, among them. The diarist struggled to verbalize precisely his feelings, and to create a system of their observation. “In my system I will not capture the intensity of the feeling but its nature [sort, type, essence – JSA, VG]”, he wrote. As Veronika Girininkaitė (2017), who investigated the diaries from a linguistic perspective, claims, “while writing about his emotions the diarist preferred to use lexical units from various ethnic languages (Polish, Russian, German, French, Lithuanian), often not matching the language of the sentence.” Also, it was found that he didn’t translate the words incorporated in idioms or collocations, and the names of emotions assumed as especially salient in a specific language. These textual artefacts could raise the interest of researchers from different fields, first of all, of those interested in emotion words and phrases across cultures and affective repertoires of multilingual individuals (see Wierzbicka, 1999; Pavlenko, 2009 and 2014). In our inquiry we will focus on the diarist’s code-switching between languages as a stylistic figure in the text units that aimed to describe psychological reality related to emotions. According to different authors, code-switching may be used either as a signal of metatextual insertions, assisting hearer at the message interpretation (Romaine, 1995, p. 162; Cheshire, 2000, p. 1307; Gumperz, 1982, p. 131), or speaker, searching for the optimally matching nomination of, for example, emotion (Pavlenko, 2014, p. 269), or even the very conceptualization of this phenomenon (ibid., p. 87; Kövesces, 1990, p. 203). [...].