The category of animacy-inanimacy in the Russian language and the linguistic worldview

Abstract

The main goal main goal of our study is to give a description of a segment of the linguistic worldview, which reflects the division of objects of objective reality into animate and inanimate, which underpins the grammatical category of animacy-inanimacy of nouns in Russian. Methodology. The methodological basis of is study is comprised of the combination of structural-semantic, cultural-anthropological and comparative methods. The interpretation of linguistic phenomena is based upon the link between the grammatical form and its semantic content. The employment of cultural-anthropological approach allows us to reveal the reflection of fragments of the linguistic worldview in language forms, a reflection of collective ideas about the surrounding reality fixed in the language and obligatory for all speakers of this language. An analysis of everyday ideas about various objects of reality that are interpreted as living or inanimate, allows us to discover, at the epistemological level, several intermediate conceptual forms (interpreted as resembling the animate, as formerly animate, as a set of living organisms, etc.).This makes it possible to explain the existence of nouns with fluctuating animacy-inanimacy. Results. The performed analysis leads us to the conclusion that in the linguistic consciousness of speakers, the classification of objects as animate/inanimate is carried out not onlyon the basis of the biological properties of these objects, but also basedontheir interpretationbyspeakersas active or inactive. At the same time, ourinterpretationof some objects may cause difficulties because they combine the characteristics of both “animate” and “inanimate”.

Modelling the Linguistic Worldview: Subject Field Scoping Review

“…Grammatical categories seem to reveal a connection with human cognitive activity, which was proved by the research results (8 papers). In particular, these studies examine the role of the grammatical category of animacy-inanimacy of nouns in creating the Russian linguistic worldview (Narushevich & Bak, 2021), gender markers in language (Gulik, 2015;Humeniuk, 2021;Khuzina & | Review Paper Mukhtarova, 2018) and the function of the Russian pronoun 'I' in phraseological units (Graneva, 2021) as well as the opposition of the Russian pronouns 'we' and 'they' (Revenko & Osetrova, 2019). The medieval linguistic worldview was analysed in terms of its influence on the morphological system of verb tenses in the modern Slavic languages (Shumilo, 2021).…”