A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF THE CONCEPT WIDOW IN GERMAN, UKRAINIAN, AND ENGLISH LINGUOCULTURES

Abstract

The paper presents the research of ethnic peculiarities of conceptualization of reality, objectified with the help of culturally marked words denoting a widow, which form the corresponding parts of the German, Ukrainian, and English language world models. The purpose of the research is to give a contrastive analysis of the verbalizations of the concept WIDOW in the German, Ukrainian, and English linguocultures. The paper uses a comprehensive methodology that combines the following methods: contrastive – to identify common and distinctive features of the concept WIDOW in the languages under comparison; conceptual-semiotic analysis – to reveal the cognitive mechanisms of the embodiment of the concept; contextual-interpretive analysis – to clarify the peculiarities of the representation of the concept in paremiae. In the highlight of contrastive ethnolinguistic studies and theory of conceptual analysis, a structure-semantic reconstruction of the concept WIDOW is performed, and the principles of its semantic-conceptual organization in the German, English, and Ukrainian language pictures of the world are revealed. The set of the conceptual and semantic marks is determined, due to the concept structure constituents (conceptual proper, imagery-associative and value), the main ideographic conceptual domains are revealed, the analyzed concept being axiologically marked and its associative linkage, due to the scope of its conceptual correlates, are determined. Factors that influence the conceptualization of the objective reality by the given ethnic groups are determined. Certain ethnocultural and ethnolinguistic peculiarities and general characteristics of verbalization of the concept WIDOW peculiar to the languages under study are found out. The analyses of widow nominations showed the allomorphism of national peculiarities of conceptualization of reality, which are influenced by archetype types, historical and cultural actuality. It is shown that WIDOW in Ukrainian culture can be viewed as a taboo concept which content is marked by negative axiological status due to the socio-cultural views formed in the period predetermining the inadmissibility of its direct naming in relevant social situations.