NATIONAL SPECIFICITY OF NAMES OF PERSONS OF DIRECT KINSHIP IN RUSSIAN AND ENGLISH (COMPARATIVE AND CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS)

Abstract

Тhe paper is devoted to the identifi cation of the national specifi cs of one of the basic lexical groups of the Russian and English languages – names of persons of direct kinship. The authors aim to identify the national specifi cs of these groups from two positions – using comparative and contrastive analysis. The hypothesis of the study is that the conclusions about the degree of the national specifi cs of the groups under investigation, made on the basis of comparative and contrastive analysis, would be the same. Russian and English substantive lexemes denoting names of persons of direct kinship extracted by means of full selection from authoritative lexicographic sources of Russian and English languages served as the research material. The study was conducted using two main procedures of the comparative- parametric method of linguistic research being developed within the framework of the Voronezh Theoretical and Linguistic School: indexing of research parameters and scaling of the results obtained. For the comparative analysis seven parameters developed within the framework of the comparative-parametric method and expressed by the following indices: the polysemy index, the index of monosememe lexemes, the index of primary denotative attribution to the group, the index of secondary denotative attribution to the group, the index of primary and secondary denotative attribution to the group, the index of primary connotative attribution to the group, the index of belonging to the studied lexico-grammatical group were used, as well as the index of primary denotative and connotative attribution to the group introduced by the authors. To analyze the contrasting pairs, the indices of denotative, connotative and functional identity of lexemes, as well as the integral index of identity of lexemes, introduced within the framework of the comparative-parametric method, were used. The use of these indices and corresponding scales, as well as the scale of the national specifi city of contrastive pairs proposed by the authors, allowed to conclude that the national specifi city of the groups under investigation is expressed not brightly and confi rmed the hypothesis of the study that conclusions about the degree of the natio nal specifi city of the lexical groups, made on the basis of comparative and contrastive analysis, will be the same.