О НАЦИОНАЛЬНОЙ СПЕЦИФИКЕ МЕТАФОРИЧЕСКОГО ОСМЫСЛЕНИЯ МИРА
NATIONAL SPECIFICITY OF METAPHORI¬CAL CONCEPTUALIZATION OF THE WORLD

Summary/Abstract: The article focuses on floral metaphor in the Russian, English, German and Spanish languages and, thus, it presupposes the existence of universal, nation-specific and individual metaphorical concepts in national conceptospheres. The national worldviews of different ethnic groups may contain the same objects which display different evaluative characteristics since their representatives distinguish different aspects of the same phenomenon. For instance, in Russian, the name of the fruit fig has the meaning of a clenched fist and has negative connotations, whereas in Spanish, the equivalent of it (“breva”) contains a group of metaphorical meanings with positive connotations (a kind of cigars, lucrative and not difficult work, unexpected advantage). Moreover, the Russian adjective “mрухлявый” (rotten) has negative connotations, whereas the German equivalent “murbe” acquires derived meanings having positive connotations – “tender” (about meat) and “fluffy, crumbly, melting in your mouth” (about cookies).In the process of objectivisation of a metaphorical concept in the languages of different ethnic groups, the national specifics is possible to manifest in the following ways: 1) just one lexeme of two lexemes of different languages will have metaphorical meaning, while in the other language, the lexeme does not undergo the process of metaphorization, i.e. national specifics manifests at the level of lexemes; 2) two lexemes of different languages having the same basic meaning acquire metaphorical meaning but they, however, differ in the number of these meanings and/or in the direction of metaphorization, i.e. national specifics manifests at the level of semantemes (the aggregate of all semes of one lexeme); 3) metaphorical mean¬ings of lexemes in different languages tend to be similar, but have some differences resulting in the structure of semes, i.e. national specifics manifests at the level of semes (separate meanings of the words-semantemes). The second type of national specifics is the most recurrent. KEY WORDS: concept, conceptosphere, metaphor, floral metaphor, national specifics, conceptosphere, metaphor, floristic metaphor, national specificity.

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