THE «NATIONAL» COMPONENT IN THE LEXICAL MEANING OF THE WORD (case study of comparative analysis of Russian and Serbian bionyms

Abstract

The subject of the research is the peculiarities of actualization of meanings of bionyms in everyday consciousness of Russians and Serbs. The objective was to identify universal and national-specific reactions to bionyms (calf, rose, apple) from native speakers of Russian and Serbian linguistic cultures. In the course of our work on “The Multilingual Dictionary of Everyday Semantics of Bionyms”, we came to the following observations: bionyms, presented in bilingual dictionaries as equivalent lexemes, upon closer inspection reveal special national-specific features, due to the traditional culture of the Russian and Serbian peoples; national specificity of a linguistic sign is manifested in the totality of special knowledge, evaluations and associations known to the representatives of a certain culture; it is the reference to the native speakers of the language that allows one to study the complex of relevant, typical and sustainable body of knowledge associated with this or that bionym in a certain historical period; the study of national specificity of the linguistic sign, on the one hand, prevents problems in intercultural communication; on the other hand, it allows one to trace the change in perception stereotypes in a diachronic perspective; аn integrated approach in a comparative aspect helps to systematically describe the semantic, formal and psycholinguistic characteristics of bionyms and to reach a new level of representation of national picture of the world from the point of view of presence of the universal and the national-specific; reference to the study of fragments of national picture of the world, represented by means of bionym interpretations, permits to demonstrate peculiarities of reality conceptualization in different cultural-linguistic communities.