Nationally Specific Concepts and Linguistic and Cultural Competence (Exemplified by English Language Teaching)

Abstract

The article concerns one possible way of forming the language and linguisticcultural competence of the humanity students, namely by revealing changes in the meanings of culturally marked lexemes that are caused by historical differentiation of the concepts they nominate. The main stages of the research are exemplified with the English words gentleman and lady. At the first stage the students are to analyze the data of etymological and explanatory dictionaries, then they interpret the etymological facts from a cultural view, compare their lexical meaning in various historical periods, state features of their semantic broadening that resulted in polysemy, and discover structural changes in their meanings – actualization of the seme 'gentle behavior' and the loss of the seme 'noble by birth'. At the next stage the students are offered some text fragments for analysis, the treatises by famous scientists and philosophers (J. Seldon, T. Ellyot, etc.) and classical English fiction works including. It is claimed to be aimed at understanding changes in the notions 'gentleman' and 'lady' due to their semantic dominant features broadening. At the final state the students are asked to comprehend and discuss interconnection between historical changes in social images of the phenomena gentleman and lady and variability in the meanings of their language nominations. The article states that the analysis of the nationally specific phenomena based at accounting interconnection between linguistic and non-linguistic factors turns to be valuable for understanding the cultural paradigm of the English language.

Keywords

• cultural-and-linguistic competence
• linguistic culture studies
• nationally specific concepts
• vocabulary
• country studies
• authentic dictionaries
• gentleman
• lady