“CONCEPT” IN RUSSIAN AND AMERICAN LINGUISTICS, OR ABOUT THE IDEOLOGICAL FACTORS OF TERMINOLOGICAL SYNONYMY FORMATION

Abstract

The article explores the formation of ponyatie (back translation: concept or notion) and kontsept (back translation: concept) terminological synonymy in the Russian and Soviet linguistics, considering also the interference of ideological factors. During the Soviet times the interpretation of ponyatie as a term was debatable. On the one hand, dialectic materialism dictated objectivity, abstract nature, and a lack of of component that were sensory, image-derived or which involved assessment. On the other hand, the Soviet scholars made attempts to re-interpret the accepted assumptions, though the new conception of ponyatie could not gain traction within Marxism-Leninism, which discarded the subjective distinctions of reality in categorization. Post-Soviet linguists then got rid of any aspects that were attributed to the innovative opinions on the essence of ponyatie. In order to label the more controversial aspects (subjectivity, sensory, imagederived, axiological components and so on),they have adopted the borrowed term kontsept. Scholars started to discuss the relevance or redundancy of kontsept, along with differentiation between the lexemes kontsept and ponyatie. At the same time, the linguistic schools of the English-speaking countries (most notably in the USA) debated the various aspects of concept rather than a difference in terms. The author attributes these distinctions to the Western Humanities lacking the ideological restrictions imposed on the sense of ponyatie in the USSR.