Linguistic and Cultural Peculiarities of Comprehension of Fiesta on the Material of the Spanish National Corpus

Abstract

The importance of the investigation is due to the rather high interest in the national-specific Spanish concept “fiesta”; an attempt to present a conceptual vision of the world picture of Spanish speakers and define place of the concept “fiesta” in the Spanish national picture of the world. The content of the concept “fiesta” is revealed on the material of the Spanish language dictionaries (explanatory and phraseological) as well as text examples obtained by sampling from Spanish National Corpus. The structure of the concept under consideration was analyzed and its conceptual and figurative components were revealed. Besides, due to the religious background of this concept, place of religious component in its structure was defined. The article justifies the necessity to use the method of analyzing dictionary definitions together with the corpus analysis when studying the considered concept, which makes it possible to outline the informative and estimated value of this concept and to identify the figurative component of this field. The material for this study was the data of Spanish dictionaries (explanatory and phraseological), fragments of scripture texts (150 text fragments), as well as material of Spanish National corpus (420 text fragments). Analysis of language material let us identify main conceptual and figurative components of the considered concept (“fiesta”); determine place and dynamics of updating religious component in its structure in the Spanish language. The article shows that “fiesta”, being a specifically Spanish phenomenon, has religious foundations; however, at the present stage of society and language development, religious basis of the analyzed concept in the Spanish language is leveled.