Article

Name: The National-Cultural Component in the Semantics of Metaphor (By the Material of the Group “A Discharged, Characterless Person”)

Authors: Elena Yu. Bulygina, Tatiana A. Tripolskaya

Novosibirsk State Pedagogical University, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation

Abstract:

The article is devoted to the semantic and cognitive analysis of metaphor in Russian, English and French. In the system of pragmatic components of metaphorical meaning the national-cultural component occupies a special place and it is the poorest to be represented in lexicographic sources. The description of the pragmatic semantics of a word, for example, in an active type dictionary, implies a preliminary comparative study of the units of the same lexical grouping in several languages.

The nature and place of this national-cultural information in the semantics of the word is an open question in modern semasiology. Linguists use the following terms: component, element, sign, connotation, national and cultural specificity, which convey information about similarities and differences in the perception of the world by representatives of different linguistic cultures. National-cultural semantics is a set of semantic features specific to the Russian language and distinguishing the corresponding meanings belonging to other language systems. It is possible to identify these elements of meaning based on the methodology of “interlingual semasiological analysis”.

The object of this study is metaphors with the semantics of a “weak-willed, spineless person”: we are interested in the mechanism of metaphor formation, the productivity of the corresponding metaphorical model, the correlation of “source domain” and “target domain”, involving the study of metaphor as a way of knowing the world, as well as emotional, evaluative, gender and national cultural components in the semantics of transferences in different languages.

The results of the semantic-pragmatic and comparative analysis allow speaking about the significant similarity of fragments in the European metaphorical picture of the world: the mechanism for transferring names is based on the same donor groups (“fabrics”, “food”, “animals”). The similarity manifests itself not only in the presence of semantic equivalents, but also in universal cognitive mechanisms of mastering reality. In the metaphorical meaning, the same signs of the original semantics are developed: softness, formlessness, dilapidation (tryapka, tyufyak, doormat, rag, chiffе); semi-liquid, jelly-like consistency (razmaznya, kisel, tyurya, nouille, moule, jellyfish, milk-and-water, milksop); weakness and a lack of will (baba, devchonka, femmelette, woman) etc.

Keywords: сomparative studies, gender and evaluative semantics, corpus and psycho-linguistic methods

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