SOCIOCULTURAL FACTORS AND THE SOCIAL COMPONENT OF WORD MEANING: A COMPARATIVE VIEW OF GERMAN, RUSSIAN AND UZBEK

Abstract

The paper considers how social relations existing in a community become part of the lexical meaning of words, and compares this process in German, Russian and Uzbek. Drawing on the semantic analysis of dictionary-attested lexemes, it shows that relations of work, role and status, age, gender, kinship, ethnicity and region are encoded as recurring semantic features which form a distinct social component of meaning. The comparison reveals that the three languages share a common set of underlying oppositions, such as “own vs. foreign”, “formal vs. informal”, “centre vs. periphery” and “experience vs. inexperience”, while differing in the cultural weight attached to them. German tends to foreground institutional and legal aspects, Russian frequently adds emotional and evaluative colouring, and Uzbek gives particular prominence to moral norms, respect for elders and family hierarchy. The findings are relevant for contrastive semantics, translation and the teaching of German as a foreign language.