Abstract:

The worldview of any ethnic group includes the concept of “family” as one of the key cultural constants. Lexical means of its expression possess both universal value and cultural specifics, which account for the importance of the study undertaken in this paper. The research deals with phraseological units belonging to the thematic field “kinship relations” in languages of different origin: Russian, English and Kumyk. The difference in their properties is explained by the fact that Russian is one of the inflectional synthetic East Slavic languages; English is an analytical language belonging to the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family; and Kumyk is an agglutinative language, which belongs to the Kipchak group of Turkic languages. The multifaceted comparative study of lexico-semantic components expressing the vertical type of kinship, their structure and means of expression is aimed at the discovery of cultural specifics in the perception and understanding of the concept “family” in Russian, English and Kumyk. The paper contains a structured analysis of lexical characteristics of the lexeme “family” (“line”, “clan”, “tribe”, “nation”) arranged on the linguistic, conceptual and mental levels. The research is done from the perspective of cultural studies, cognitive linguistics and semantics. It employs the methods of descriptive, analytical and semantic analyses (with elements of componental and definitional analyses). The study contributes to a broader discussion of the correlation of language and mind and is significant for revealing the culture-specific linguistic and cognitive features of Russian, English and Kumyk cultures. The comparative study of phraseological units belonging to the thematic field “kinship relations” is instrumental in revealing communalities and differences in the worldviews of the three cultures.

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