Impersonal constructions as a reflection of linguistic worldview

The article explores the intralingual and interlingual (translingual) communicative potential of Russian impersonal constructions. The relevance of the topic is conditioned by the following: a large portion of cognitive research in the fi eld focuses on lexical meaning and semantic relations between words, with little research done to evaluate grammatical phenomena as a means of refl ecting the worldview. The article focuses on the functional and semantic features of the category of impersonality in the Russian language. Russian impersonal sentences are compared and contrasted with their English equivalents (selected from Ivan Turgenev’s works translated from Russian by Constance Garnett and included into the book Dream Tales and Prose Poems). A hypothesis is formulated and proved that the communicative core of impersonality is formed by impersonal constructions in which a predicate is expressed by personal verbs in an impersonal form or impersonal refl exive verbs with the postfi x -sya corresponding to similar active verbs without postfi xes. The presence of such structures indicates the communicative need to conceal the subject of the action and describe the situation as arbitrary, self-developing, and dominating the subject, in which the latter is not directly involved and acts exclusively as a recipient. Being translated into English, most Russian impersonal constructions are replaced by English constructions with personal verbs, which leads to a reduction of meaning, and the semantics of impersonality may only be partially recreated by lexical means. A conclusion is drawn that Russian impersonal constructions play a major role in the conceptualization of reality and the creation of cultural codes that are most signifi cant for native speakers at the given point of historical development.