The concept of “ugliness” in Russian linguistic culture: methods of objectification

Abstract

The article discusses the ways of objectifying the concept of “ugliness” in Russian linguistic culture. The fundamental principles of considering concepts in modern linguistics are highlighted, which are based on the principle of anthropocentrism. The main components of the linguocultural concept “ugliness” are identified through historical, etymological, word–formation analysis. The authors of the article used the method of component analysis, the method of semantic-cognitive analysis, the method of linguoculturological analysis, which facilitated to identify the conceptual features of the concept of “ugliness”. The lexemes “ugly” (for
male) and «ugly» (for female) are considered as representatives in the contexts of word usage. As a result of the study, the authors concluded that in the Russian language picture, lexemes with the root ugly-, for example, adjectives ugly, ugly and nouns ugly, ugly, ugliness, act as representatives of the concept “ugliness”. When considering the use of the word “ugly”, the following conceptual features were identified. When identifying the conceptual features of the noun “ugly”, we identified the following. Separately, a group of word usage of the lexeme “ugly” was singled out when describing males. It was revealed that these variants of word usage were characteristic of the works of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.