linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Ling ...
, a hypostasis (from the
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
objectification
In social philosophy, objectification is the act of treating a person, as an object or a thing. It is part of dehumanization, the act of disavowing the humanity of others. Sexual objectification, the act of treating a person as a mere object of sex ...
with personality) of an entity or quality. It often connotes the personification of typically elemental powers, such as wind and fire, or human life, fertility, and death. In descriptive linguistics, the term was first introduced by
Leonard Bloomfield
Leonard Bloomfield (April 1, 1887 – April 18, 1949) was an American linguist who led the development of structural linguistics in the United States during the 1930s and the 1940s. He is considered to be the father of American distributionalis ...
to account for uses of synsemantic words as autosemantic in sentences such as ''I'm tired of your ifs and buts''. In this sense, the usage meaning of the word is referred to as a whole.
The term ''hypostasis'' is considered to be scientifically and culturally neutral, for the purpose of describing name-to-term relationships that, within
religion
Religion is usually defined as a social- cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that generally relates humanity to supernatur ...
and
theology
Theology is the systematic study of the nature of the divine and, more broadly, of religious belief. It is taught as an academic discipline, typically in universities and seminaries. It occupies itself with the unique content of analyzing th ...
might be termed a "
deification
Apotheosis (, ), also called divinization or deification (), is the glorification of a subject to divine levels and, commonly, the treatment of a human being, any other living thing, or an abstract idea in the likeness of a deity. The term has ...
", or otherwise by the more pejorative "
idolatry
Idolatry is the worship of a cult image or "idol" as though it were God. In Abrahamic religions (namely Judaism, Samaritanism, Christianity, the Baháʼí Faith, and Islam) idolatry connotes the worship of something or someone other than the ...
". The concept of "hypostasis" functions as a kind of
conceptual inverse
Conceptual may refer to:
Philosophy and Humanities
*Concept
*Conceptualism
*Philosophical analysis (Conceptual analysis)
*Theoretical definition (Conceptual definition)
* Thinking about Consciousness (Conceptual dualism)
*Pragmatism (Conceptual p ...
for terms which may have originated as personal names, and have linguistically evolved to become common terms for general concepts and qualities.
See also
*
Hypostasis (literature)
Hypostasis (from Greek ''hypo-'' "below" + ''stasis'' "standing") is the essence of metafiction, a rare, literary moment when characters in fiction become aware of their own fictional nature.
Debut
The debut of hypostasis in literature occurs in ...