The Lingual-Cultural Field Of The "Road" Concept

With the development of anthropocentric theory in the 21 st century,linguistic culturology came into being as an interdisciplinary study of language,culture and human activities.As an important part of linguistic culturology,the study of “concept(концепт)” attracts extensive attention in both theory study and practice research.Furthermore,as the “basic unit of culture”,the concept carries the knowledge and experience of a specific social group,so the research on the core concepts of each nation can enable us to further grasp the connotation of its culture.In addition,in the study of concept,the theory of lingual-cultural field investigates further into the concept through a strict hierarchical structure to complete the field analysis of concept.In this paper,the concept of “road” has been chosen as the research focus.The concept of “road” in Russian culture is highly metaphorical and is rich in symbolic significance,especially in Russian literature.However,there are few studies about it in the present literature,and the existing research has limitations in research perspectives.Therefore,this paper combines the lingual-cultural field theory and free-association experiment to study the concept of “road”.First,this paper attempts to analyze the etymology,dictionary definition and textual basis of the concept word to describe the lingual-cultural field of it.Second,we have conducted free-association experiment for the concept word,and then by comparing the results of this experiment and the content of the Russian Associative Dictionary,we have constructed the dynamic lingualcultural field for “road” concept.According to the results,this experiment not only verified the existing content of the Russian Associative Dictionary,but also enriched the associative meaning of “road”,indicating the dynamic change of lingual-cultural field and the profound influence of time and social development on linguistic awareness.In this study,we probed into the conceptual representation of linguistic awareness,and revealed the Russian cultural connotations of the concept word “road”,including the attitude towards life,ideal and faith,patriotism,sense of mission,etc.