Концептуальные представления о чуждости, отраженные в русской языковой картине мира, сквозь призму градуального противопоставления «ДРУГОЙ – ИНОЙ – ЧУЖОЙ – ЧУЖДЫЙ»

Abstract

The picture of the world fixed in the consciousness of the Russian people carries a number of distinctive idiosyncretistic features that allow penetrating into the essence of the Russian culture and worldview. Alienness is one of the concepts in the conceptual field on which the Russian cultural identification system «Friend or Foe» is based on. To reveal the conceptual content of Alienness, the article analyses the synonymic row other – different – foreign – alien. The analysis of the row is carried out using a certain algorithm: data from etymological, explanatory, associative and phraseological dictionaries, as well as the national panchronic corpus of the Russian language are alternately studied. The results are as follows. At the stage of the etymological analysis, it has become obvious that despite the apparent logic of the row other – different – foreign – alien, the word alien is somewhat distant from the other words, their modern definitions being compared. Further, according to the most contemporary (among the studied) explanatory dictionaries (published in 1973), the word alienness does not have any direct meanings (only figurative ones). There are no phraseological units containing the word alien, and one can rarely come across the word (only in 23 cases) when analyzing the contemporary cross-section of the national panchronic corpus of the Russian language (2021). According to the associative dictionary, the reactions to the stimulus-word alien differ from the reactions to the other words-stimuli in the synonymic row. These reactions carry only ideological and hostile connotations, which makes it difficult to build the given above row. The paper concludes that the concept Alienness carries the idea of something foreign, which is rejected by the Russian culture, and serves as a marker of something that cannot be accepted by the Russian people.