Language in culture: An examination of the conceptualization of health in Russian language and culture

Although there has been considerable scholarship on the relationship of language to culture, an approach which integrates multiple linguistic structures into the illumination of a given cultural concept has been lacking. This dissertation will attempt to make a small contribution the research by examining lexical roots, semantic collocations and grammatical constructions used in health expressions in contemporary standard Russian to reveal some of the more salient aspects of the conceptualization of health in Russian culture.; The study begins with some preliminary suggestions about the relationship between language and culture which will be carefully considered in later chapters. It will be hypothesized that language and culture are not distinct entities, but are part of a complex dynamic system in which each changes and is changed by the other. In particular, the work of cognitive anthropologists as well as that of linguists and semioticians from the Prague school will be instrumental.; The second step will be a careful examination of Russian language scholarship on proverbs including a study of the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic elements of proverbs and the way that proverbs fit into culture as a text genre directed toward the transmission and reinforcement of cultural attitudes.; A more focused examination of health-related Russian language proverbs will be the third step. The themes which recur in this relatively large corpus of proverbs will be interrogated to discover how they may illuminate Russian cultural attitudes toward health. This section will also include the results of survey of contemporary usage of health-related proverbs in Russian which will show an overall decrease in usage of such proverbs, but the perseverance of many of the themes detailed earlier.; The final section will focus on Russian impersonal constructions as they are used to express health. There is a generally-accepted understanding that such expressions can indicate a distancing of agency or volition from the logical experience of the verb. In health-expressions, the speaker often chooses to exploit such constructions and their concomitant distancing of agency. Many of the themes found in the earlier discussion of proverbs are supported by the use of this grammatical construction.