Language as a Concept of Russian Aphoristics

Abstract

The article describes aphoristics as an integral part of the language and culture studies reflecting the value system of the people's mentality diachronically and synchronically. Russian aphoristics has been preserving national identity, morale and values throughout centuries, for generations transferring cultural and historic memory of the people. However, aphoristics reflects not only unique, specific features of Russian culture and mentality but also demonstrates unanimity of the culture codes and the universal character of human values. The study specially focuses on the Russian aphoristics sphere of concepts whereas, possible to outline and depict dozens of concepts specified on the level of culture as well. The concept LANGUAGE represents one of the key concepts of the human cognitive system, hence it is widely and diversely exposed in the corpus of the Russian aphoristics of the 18th-21st centuries. In aphoristics, LANGUAGE emerges in different ways. In Russian aphoristics, the specification of the concept LANGUAGE has got an ambivalent nature. Here LANGUAGE is realized in the homonymic phraseo-semantic field being verbalized by means of the most frequent components of the core and periphery of the phraseo-semantic field: LANGUAGE (Russian language, native tongue), foreign LANGUAGE, word, parole, syllable, etc.

Keywords

• aphorism
• aphoristics
• concept language
• linguoculturology
• linguistic worldview