The works of Anna Vezhbitskaya have been in the center of attention of world and Russian science for almost forty years. In 1999, the publishing house "Languages of Slavic Culture" published a large monograph of the scientist "Semantic universals and description of languages". A new book published in the small series " Language. Semiotics. Culture" of the same publishing house, - "Understanding cultures through keywords" (Moscow, 2001), continues the cycle of linguoculturological research by A. Vezhbitskaya primarily in the field of semantics, but not only. The main points developed in her work are that different languages differ significantly from each other in their vocabulary, and this property reflects the differences in the value characteristics of cultural communities.
In the preface to the publication, its translator A.D. Shmelev reasonably writes that " A. Vezhbitskaya's book demonstrates that studying the vocabulary of a language gives us objective (italics ours. - O. N.) data that allows you to judge the basic values of the culture served by this language. A thorough linguistic analysis can serve as the basis for a rigorous (...) using a universal semantic metalanguage makes it possible to present the results of such a study in such a way that they are understandable even to people who do not belong to this culture and are not familiar with this language" (p.11). This remark of the author of the preface seems to us very significant also because the cultural components of a particular language have not yet been fully clarified (and in many cases even unknown). How do they affect the
page 121
formation of society? What is the relationship between language components and cultural components? How do semantic "transformations" occur within the language system, and does this affect the movement of society itself? These and many other issues are solved by A. Vezhbitskaya on the pages of her book.
In the Introduction, the author draws attention to the fact that th ...
Read more