THE PERCEPTION OF THE LEXEME “HOMELAND” IN THE CHINESE AND RUSSIAN LINGUISTIC CULTURES

Abstract

The article considers a fragment of the national-cultural linguistic worldview through the perception of the word Homeland in the framework of the intercultural comparison. This concept of the universal value is an important cultural, mental and linguistic constant in all languages. The article describes the results of the experiment concerning the linguistic consciousness of Russian and Chinese informants. The subject of our scientific interest is the naive interpretation of the concept of Homeland in these cultures. With the use of the component analysis, similar and different semantic components of the word are identified and analyzed. The data, collected by means of a questionnaire survey among 80 informants (40 Russian and 40 Chinese), confirmed the original hypothesis about the universal and nationally specific components of the word. The naive interpretation gives the composite and, most importantly, objective information, which allows us to draw conclusions about the reality. In the aspect of the national cultural specificity, the naive worldview is a special “coloring” of the world, determined by the national significance of objects, phenomena, processes and special attitudes formed under the influence of the national culture and the history of the people. The distribution of the informants’ interpretations in the information system “Semograf” on the semantic fields gave the opportunity to analyze the data using the tools of field analysis (to create a semantic classification of interpretations with multivalued mappings between fields). Graphically explicit fields and relationships between them allowed us to identify significant semantic components for Russian and Chinese speakers in the structure of the word Homeland.

Keywords

• национальная специфика
• языковая картина мира
• языковое сознание
• слово Родина, наивное толкование
• лингвокультура
• информационная система «Семограф».