Conceptualization of the human condition and the environment in Russian language

Abstract

The article presents an analysis of the specifics of conceptualization and grammaticalization of the content complex of the human and environmental condition in the Russian language in comparison with the Bulgarian language. The study is carried out on the material of parallel original and translated texts of the Russian National Corpus and a sample from F. M. Dostoevsky’s novel “Crime and Punishment” and its translation into Bulgarian by G. Konstantinov. The problem of dependence of discrepancies between the original and the translation on the systemic features of languages is investigated. Special attention is paid to the problem of translatability of grammatical specificity and to the grammaticalization of different types of state in the two languages. On the material of various models conveying the semantics of state, the peculiarity of expression of this meaningful complex in Russian is shown. Research methods: systematic, comparative, contextual, structural-grammatical. The author of the article comes to the conclusion about the relative commonality of linguistic conceptualization of the world in two languages: in their grammatical systems, as well as in lexical and phraseological means, languages reflect the cognitive evaluation of reality, but in certain cases they are dominated by different aspects of evaluation. The Russian linguistic picture of the world is characterized by object-spatial dominance, and it determines the expression of the content complex of the state in its different types, the predominant grammatical means of expression of which are impersonal sentences and prepositionalcase forms. Bulgarian language concentrates on the state as an action. The difference in the conceptualization of the state is often observed in the transition from Russian impersonal sentences to bi-constituent sentences, from prepositional phrases to Bulgarian verb forms. The translator’s skill depends on understanding the systemic differences between the source and target languages and the ability to use possible variant correspondences.

Keywords:

conceptualization, grammaticalization, Russian language, Bulgarian language, system discrepancies, translation problems