Perspectives of cultural conceptual linguistics (a study of the belarusian concept narod)

Abstract

Since the end of the 20th century, intense studies have been conducted in the realms of cognitive linguistics and cultural linguistics. One of the features peculiar to the development of these realms in the East Slavic countries is their integration. As a result, a new field of study emerged – cultural conceptual linguistics. This field has gained the greatest popularity in the region since then. This popularity didn’t come out of thin air. Firstly, cognitive linguistics and cultural linguistics began to progress almost simultaneously in the post-Soviet era. Secondly, much of the credit goes to the local well-established research schools which contributed a lot to language semantics. The article analyses the focus and novel approaches of cultural conceptual research. Different definitions to “concept” are provided. The concept is a mental unit that can be represented by a word, phrase, sentence, or even a whole text. The cultural linguistic concept differs from other mental units due to its evaluative component. The core of a concept always contains values. In most Belarusian research at the turn of the 20th – beginning 21st cc. key linguistic issues revolved around more traditional topics – in the paradigm of structural and functional linguistics. However, some ideas proposed by cultural and cognitive linguists in recent decades were known long before that, as Belarusian linguistics has always recognized the fact that language and cognitive processes are closely related. The article addresses one of the focal concepts of Belarusian cultural conceptualizations that is the concept narod ‘folk; people; nation’ by employing the prototypical approach which is an effective way to determine the concept structure and its specific character.