Abstract
The cross-cultural study of the words defining social values are of particular importance in interdisciplinary contexts, as the knowledge of their culture-specific semantic as well as discursive characteristics contributes to a better understanding of how people think and act in a society. The paper focuses on the English lexeme tolerance and its translation equivalents in Russian and Serbian. It aims to specify linguacultural characterizations of the notion of tolerance in British, Russian and Serbian cultures. The data were taken from dictionaries, British National Corpus (BNC), Russian National Corpus (RNC), Corpus of Contemporary Serbian (SrpKor), as well as media and Internet resources. The combined methodology (pragma-semantic, discourse and lingua-cultural analysis) enabled us to reveal that the dictionary equivalents of the English lexeme tolerance are not complete, but partial. The findings show that in Russian and Serbian the words of Latin etymology tolerantnost’ and tolerancija seem to invoke both positive and negative attitudes, reflecting cultural norms and values. The paper contributes to the understanding of tolerance in the observed linguacultures and confirms that it is important to consider interdisciplinary approaches to language studies.
About the authors
Tatiana Larina is Professor of Linguistics at the Faculty of Philology and in the Institute of Modern Languages, Intercultural Communication and Migration at Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia (RUDN University). She is the Editor-in-Chief of the Russian Journal of Linguistics and a member of the editorial boards of several international journals. She has a wide experience in international education, as she has undergone training and conducted research in Ireland (Centre for Languages and Communication Studies of Trinity College, University of Dublin) and given lectures as a visiting professor in India, Finland, Kazakhstan, Italy, and other countries. Her research interests and publications focus on language, culture and communication, identity, cross-cultural pragmatics, cross-cultural communication, communicative ethnostyles, and (im)politeness theory. She regularly presents at international conferences and publishes both in Russian and English. She has been a member of the ENIEDA Network since 2009.
Vladimir Ozyumenko is Associate Professor at the Department of Foreign Languages, Law Institute, Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia (RUDN University). His research interests are in the field of legal English, culture and identity, cross-cultural communication, media discourse analysis, mechanisms of manipulation and persuasion in political and media discourse. He regularly presents at international conferences and publishes internationally in journals and volumes both in Russian and English.
Svetlana Kurteš is a UK-based scholar with an extensive international experience in the area of linguistic and intercultural education, spanning over almost three decades. She has held academic positions at universities in Europe, Asia and the Middle East and is currently affiliated with the University of Madeira, where she is engaged on an invited basis. The focus of her research interests clusters around interdisciplinary approaches to communication, culture and society and issues surrounding their pedagogical applications. Since 2010 she has been Vice President of the ENIEDA Network, having coordinated a significant number of its activities. She regularly presents and publishes internationally.
Acknowledgements
This publication has been supported by the RUDN University Strategic Academic Leadership Program.
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