The Semantics of Participation in the Russian Language as a Reflection of the Cultural Universal «Own/Foreign» Concept and the «West/East» Opposition

Abstract

This paper deals with the issues of an important ethnic trait through the reflection in the Russian language and in the speech behavior of native speakers. This trait is focused around the need for actualization of «participation» or complicity in speech and social behavior as an invisible connection established in the inner world of the subject of the relationship of participation with other persons, animals, objects, spatial and social objects and even eras and ideas. The developed semantics of participation in the Russian language reflects the cultural universal concept of «own/foreign». L. Levy-Bruhl studied one member of that opposition theoretically and on the basis of extensive empirical material created the anthropological theory of participation. Russian linguists V. V. Ivanov, Yu. D. Apresyan, V. S. Khrakovsky and A. P. Volodin, I. I. Kovtunova studied concepts associated with the notion of participation in the mid‑1980s using the material of Russian deixis and the category of possessiveness. In the Russian language, the semantics of participation is expressed by various linguistic means: the means of verbal and pronominal deixis, diminutives, possessive syntactic constructions and affixes, words with the semantics of emotional attitude and assistance