Li J. Concepts of Life and Death in the Russian language

Object – concepts as the way of comprehension the life and death phenomena in the Russian language; the aim – to find the contents of the Life and Death concepts in their semantic and language representations unity, fixed in Russian linguocultural traditions; methods – interpretation based on semantic analysis which involves certain research procedures: the etymological analysis of concept names; semantic analysis of corresponding words; interpretative semantic analysis of expressions with evaluation marks (sayings, aphorisms, quotations), which express concepts; novelty – for the first time the Life and Death concept analysis aims are realised considering deductive purposes of studying Russian as foreign language; figurative schemes of national phraseology and poetic metaphor have been correlated for the first time and some mythological, religious and sociocultural sources of the Life and Death images in the Russian linguoculturology have also been defined; results – on the basis of words like life, alive, to live; death, to die, dead and so on the nucleus of concept meanings of life and death was found; also the correlation of historical, “passive” and actual notional spaces of Life and Death concepts is determined; the ways of embodiment of mythological imagination of life and death in Russian phraseology and poetic metaphor are considered; the religious and sociocultural ideas of life and death fixed in the Russian language have also been reconstructed; field – cognitive linguistics, linguoculturology.