Cultural Component in the Semantics of a pragmatically marked Word: Methods of Identification and Lexicography in an Active Type Dictionary

This article presents the electronic lexicographic project «Pragmatically marked vocabulary: lexicographic description of the national-cultural component in the semantics of a word» and covers a number of key issues related to the definition of the concept of «national-cultural / cultural-specific» in words semantic and searching for possible ways of lexicography. As part of the heterogeneous lexical meaning, denotative and pragmatic macrocomponents are distinguished, between which there are complex and not always obvious semantic connections. The pragmatic macrocomponent includes many microcomponents (evaluative, ideological, gender, social, national-cultural, etc.). The national-cultural component represents special information in the semantics, which indicates the perception of the world inherent in a particular linguistic society through the prism of the national language. We are talking about universal and unique features of the semantics of pragmatically marked vocabulary. This is what makes lexicography particularly difficult. The lexicographic description is preceded by a special comparative study, including a comparative analysis of correlated lexical meanings in different European languages. In addition, component and corpus methods are used. The electronic lexicographic resource consists of two parts: 1) materials from classical explanatory dictionaries, 2) lexicography of pragmatically marked meaning, taking into account its variable potential. Turning to explanatory dictionaries from different periods allows us 1) to identify dynamic processes in this fragment of the lexical system and 2) explore possible ways of describing pragmatic information in a word. We propose to represent the national-cultural component in a special area of the dictionary entry in the Database of pragmatically marked vocabulary of the Russian language, comparing it with the semantic specificity of equivalent units of other languages. The result of this study is a lexicographic description of words from different thematic groups that contain national-cultural (national-specific) information in their meanings.

national-cultural component, semantics, lexicography, comparative lexicology, metaphor, database, pragmatically marked lexicon, micro components of pragmatic meaning, national language, linguistic picture of the world