Abstract
The article shows connection between the national mentality and the formation of grammar on the example of the French, Kazakh, Russian and English languages. It highlights the usage of copular verbs and modality in the first pair of languages, and word order, imperative mood and impersonal sentences in the second. The analysis shows that while teaching grammar of a foreign language, it is essential to combine it with cultural information and to compare two cultures at that point. Such cultural dialogue will ease the conception of the foreign language grammar phenomena and help form grammar competence – one of the means of intercultural communication – assuming the ability of a linguistic persona to elicit, understand and interpret the concepts formed by grammar tools of a foreign language.
Highlights
It’s common knowledge that a human, his culture, behavior and mentality can not exist beyond a language or without it
Being a means of human communication, it has a social nature and national character which results in the fact that any language reflects some characteristics of national mentality, ethic and cultural values, as well as behavioral code of a certain society
Some studies show that the correlation between cultural values and a language grammar system is less vivid than that between culture and vocabulary, but more significant
Summary
It’s common knowledge that a human, his culture, behavior and mentality can not exist beyond a language or without it. Being a means of human communication, it has a social nature and national character which results in the fact that any language reflects some characteristics of national mentality, ethic and cultural values, as well as behavioral code of a certain society. As W. von Humboldt stated: “The number of words in a language shows the size of its space, but its grammar gives us a concept of the mentality inner organization” (Humboldt, 1984: 345) It was this famous German scientist who introduced the idea of “linguistic consciousness of a nation” (Humboldt, 1984: 47). Language mentality presents “a special national way of the world presentation through signs manifested in semantic system of a language” (Radbil, 2010: 66)
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