Аxiological aspect of culturally marked lexis

Abstract

Introduction. Language is a powerful indicator of underlying cultural values. Much of the lexis of a language has a cultural referent and is thus specific to a speech community. The meaning of culturally marked words is often difficult to grasp without some cultural knowledge and poses translation problems, particularly when the words are associated with cultural domains. In the present paper we focus on the cultural domain of transport. The article is devoted to the research of ethnic peculiarities of conceptualization of reality in the domain of transport, objectified with the help of culturally marked words, which form the corresponding parts of the Ukrainian, German, Russian, English language world models.

Purpose. The aim of the article is to analyze ethnolinguistic peculiarities of lexis denoting vehicles in English, German, Russian and Ukrainian.

Methods. The present paper is done in the frames of contrastive trend in the study of language-culture interaction and deals with the problems of linguistic gnosiology, linguistic psychology and linguistic ethnology. A set of various methods and techniques is used (descriptive, comparative, typological methods, component, contextual analysis, conceptual analysis, psycholinguistic semantic scaling).

Results. The research of culturally determined language phenomena which belong to different structural levels of four languages (Ukrainian, Russian, English and German) has shown that cultural language facts (ethnic markers of language consciousness) have ability to model specific features of national world outlook and national way of thinking with the help national stereopypes and linguaculturems. The main attention in this research was given to the phenomenon of ethnic mentality (the way ethnic collective perceive, feel, imagine, interpret and estimate the reality) which is rather hard to study because of its very abstract character. The article provides a complex research of ethnocultural specific character of nationally-marked language elements. Philosophical concept of the research is created on basis of ethnocentric comprehension of language elements. The theoretical aspects of dichotomous opposition “universal/national” are considered and ideological specificities of its ethnocultural presentation are established. The article traces the genesis of ethnoesthetic views and criteria that have arisen owing to the interaction of geographical and climatic, historical and sociological, and ethnopsychological factors.

Conclusion. The peculiarities of correlation between language and mind, language and thinking, language and culture are defined. Contemporary studies of the problem of language picture of the world, the essence of ethnic stereotypes, their influence and role in the culture of ethnic groups are analyzed in the article. It is shown that the content of stereotypes is largely shaped by extralinguistic factors which are reflected in the languages. The analyses of means of transport nominations via application of semantic opposition SELF / OTHER showed the allomorphism of national peculiarities of conceptualization of reality.