COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE CONTENT OF THE CONCEPT-VALUES OF TOLERANCE IN THE LINGUISTIC CONSCIOUSNESS OF RUSSIANS AND AMERICANS

Matyushina Vasilisa Valeryevna

The emphasis is placed on the comparative contents analysis of the concept value TOLERANCE (TOLERANTNOST) in American and Russian linguistic consciousness. The axiological aspect of the meaning of the word is in the focus of the author’s attention. Here the author supports the idea that consciousness does not only reflect reality but it is an instrument of evaluating reality as well. The semantic analysis is applied as the contents of a linguistic sign serves as a linguistic projection of the contents of the concept value TOLERANCE (TOLERANTNOST). The research goal is the following: to analyze the contents of the concept value, to define the components of its meaning. In the course of the research there was applied a great amount of material from American and Russian encyclopedic and definition dictionaries together with the material from the American National Corpus of the English Language, as well as from the Russian National Corpus of the Russian Language. Linguistic consciousness is perceived as a value-oriented consciousness. A great deal of attention is paid to illustrating the phenomenon of the meaning forming and the contents shaping as far as the concept development is concerned. Both the meaning and the contents of a concept are regarded as multi-faceted and many-sided structure, composed of a lot of elements. The experimental research is done to analyze and define the contents of the concept value by means of a semantic analysis.

Keywords:Language, consciousness, understanding, linguistic consciousness, externality, semes, value, component-definitional analysis