Theoretical and methodological landmarks of an educational linguoculturological dictionary for foreign philologists

Abstract

This article takes into consideration theoretical and methodological foundations of an educational linguoculturological dictionary for foreign students-philologists. The dictionary describes connotative lexical units representing the most important national codes of a linguistic culture. Special attention is paid to linguistic, methodological, and lexicographic understanding of a cultural connotation, including associative and evaluative potential of a word as its main component. Since cultural connotations determine the content of figurative language means (metaphors, epithets, stable comparisons etc.) as well as various literary texts, a vital task of educational lexicography is to help foreign students-philologists to get hidden cultural meanings of a word and thus to “read” the most significant cultural texts of the target language. The aim of this paper is to present a project of an educational linguoculturological dictionary allowing foreign philologists to master the connotative potential of Russian lexis step-by-step: from sematic, associative, and evaluative content to figurative means of various artistic texts. The research resulted in determining linguistic and methodological foundations of an educational linguoculturological dictionary for foreign philologists, as well as defining its structure and content. In the future, the authors plan to compile the full text and publish the dictionary. Interrelatedness of the major principles of educational lexicography (the principle of anthropocentricity realized in thorough consideration of the dictionary recipient specifics, principles of multidirectional selectivity and national orienteers), their connection with academic traditions of Russian lexicography and principles of teaching Russian as a foreign language on the whole can be seen as theoretical and methodological foundations of an educational linguoculturological dictionary. The main difference of the structure and content of an educational linguoculturological dictionary entry from that of a general-purpose dictionary entry is reflected, first of all, in the quantity and content of its major zones, based on a comparative study of semantic, associative, evaluative, figurative potentials of the vocabulary that articulate the most important national codes of a linguistic culture. It distinguishes 5 major zones of an educational dictionary entry: semantical-grammatical, associative and connotative, evaluative and connotative, figurative means of a language zone and the literary zone. A developed project of an educational linguoculturological dictionary allows to “decode” step-by-step the connotative potential of the culture-specific vocabulary and help foreign students to “read” the most significant cultural texts of the target language.