The key concept as a structuring base of Russian and Belarusian linguistic worldview

This article presents the comparative analysis of the key concepts in linguistic world views of the Belarusians and Russians. The key concepts Motherland, language, freedom are considered. To reconstruct the key concepts the author took classical Russian and Belarusian artistic texts. The work is relevant due to the novelty of the presented language material and the insufficiency of the comparative analysis of the key concepts in various linguistic cultures. The linguistic world views of closely related nations are of particular interest in this regard. The identified universal and nationally specific components in the structures of key concepts led to the conclusion that the mentalities of the Russians and Belarusians are not the same. We are planning to continue a comparative study of key concepts (family, nation, man, etc.) in order to identify similar and different features not only of particular concepts, but also of the national concept spheres of the Russians and Belarusians. The author used general linguistic methods (descriptive, comparative) and methods of cultural and cognitive linguistics (linguocultural and semantic-cognitive methods of text studies). This article is a prepared under the supervision of Doctor of Philology, Professor V.A. Maslova.