Associative reactions of Russians and the Chinese in the aspect of lacunarity

Language as a means of international communication reflects specific facts of national material and spiritual culture of the society it serves. Each native speaker is a product of complex interaction of social-historical and cultural factors. Cultural heritage as a whole allows people of the same speech community to understand each other easily. As is known, two national cultures never coincide completely, which is ex­pressed in the national specificity of speaking communities. When representatives of different countries in­teract, this noncoincidence inevitably causes misunderstanding, especially perceived in case of lacunarity. Theory and practice of translation, as well as methodology of teaching foreign languages provide a wealth of examples when notions of one language have no name in the other language, that is, examples of lexical gaps. The given article considers different types of national specificity: national-cultural specificity of semantics, national-conceptual specificity of semantics, national-connotative specificity of semantics. Lexical-semantic groups having connotations in Russian and Chinese linguocultures are analyzed, characteristics of the conno­tations are investigated on the basis of an associative experiment.