National peculiarities of russian and english substantive lexemes from the perspective of communicative relevance

Abstract

The article is devoted to the peculiarities of national specificity of the most frequently used Russian and English substantive lexemes within the framework of the aspect of communicative relevance. The article focuses on the investigation of one hundred most frequently used substantive lexemes of the Russian language and one hundred most frequently used substantive lexemes of the English language. These lexemes were selected from the Frequency Dictionary by S. A. Sharov and the List of the Most Frequently Used Nouns of the British National Corpus. The examples were taken from the Russian National Corpus and the British National Corpus. Lexemes were divided into groups depending on the volume of their semanthemes. The study showed that not only D1 sememes, i.e. the main meaning, can be in demand, there were identified the cases when the derived meanings turned out to be the most frequently used ones. As part of the study we determined the degree of national specificity of Russian and English lexemes, we used the indices of the communicative relevance of denotative and connotative sememes in the semantheme and the indices of the communicative relevance of denotative and connotative sememes in the group. To determine the degree of national peculiarities in each of the groups under consideration within the frame of the aspect of communicative relevance, we used the integral index on the aspect of communicative relevance. The obtained indexes allow to state that in terms of communicative relevance in the groups of the most frequently used substantive lexemes of the Russian and English languages, national peculiarities vary from bright to substantial. Based on the average index the degree of national specificity within the aspect of communicative relevance was concluded to be hyper-expressed.