Koncepcja oralności W. J. Onga a poglądy polskich badaczy języka mówionego

Abstract

The author of this article confronts Walter J. Ong’s views upon the spoken language of primitive societies (as articulated in his work Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word) with the conceptions proposed by Polish linguists specializing in spoken (colloquial) language. The confrontation leads to the following conclusion: even though the name of Walter J. Ong is quoted relatively infrequently, and however rare are the implicit references to his concept of the orality of language, (which could partly be justified by the fact that the Polish translation of his work, Oralność i piśmienność. Słowo poddane technologii, was published only in 1992), the traits Ong indicated as characteristic to oral cultures have long been known to specialists in contemporary spoken (colloquial) language (including colloquial Polish). The number and configuration of the traits Polish scholars distinguish are slightly different from what Walter J. Ong proposed in his work, but it must be remembered that the object of his research was different, too. Ong’s study focused upon orality in the cultures of primitive societies, while the texts quoted in the present article focus upon contemporary colloquial language, which - inevitably, though to a varying extent - is bound with the written language; moreover, in the global scale such bounds are reciprocal. Within contemporary society, it would be a difficult task to come across an individual who would not live in the culture of literacy, and would not be subject to the influences of cyrographic and polygraphic culture.