Neology As A Means Of Cross-Cultural Interaction In The Xix Century

Abstract

This research makes an attempt to study the realization of the verbal cultural potential in cross-cultural communication against the Russian home and foreign policy in the mid-XIX century. The selected material is the periodical scientific edition of the Russian Geographical society. The choice was made due to the peculiarities of the RGS activity, founded within the Ministry of home affairs, with its expeditions aimed at both scientific and political solutions and that was greatly reflected on the edition's pages. The empiric unit of the research is the neologism with the definition prescribed by the author of the article. The analysis considers lexical units and definitions. The research proved the correlation between the home and foreign state policy and the character of word usage, peculiarities of definition and the degree of realizing the cultural and historical component of the word meaning. Neologisms are less frequent in the texts about regions which are of near foreign interest for the Russian empire, their selection is of practical necessity, their notes are brief, mostly single-word ones. The texts about those regions with planned foreign connection and pre-study as the primary task contain more neologisms, their thematic variety is wider, the cultural component is actualized by the author, definitions are detailed and complex. The new word (dialect in our case) is meaningful in the texts about home regions; there are word lists with authors' definitions, containing culturological, ethnographic, etymological and other observations of the author on the people life and its manifestation in the word.