Assessment category: methods of description (based on the material of a linguistic experiment)

This article is devoted to the problem of nationally specific features of the evaluative component of the word meaning. In the modern scientific paradigm, language is considered to be a cognitive tool for understanding the world, storing and representing the cultural experience and values of a people that reflect the picture of the world of given people. One of the important components of the language picture of the world is the category of evaluation - the system of values of society and the individual, objectified in units of language. For each person, first of all, its own scale is significant, and it is the result of combining external (common, socially conditioned) values and a system of internal, purely individual assessments. Thus, the expression of the assessment, on the one hand, is prepared by the sociolinguistic background of the utterance (the difference between positive and negative, relevant for the carriers of this culture), and on the other hand, by the individual extralinguistic characteristics of the subject (social status, education, profession, age). In the aspect of the task, the moral and ethical ideas of society are of particular interest, which are culturally conditioned by ideas about morality, values accepted in society, and these ideas are fixed in the lexical meanings of individual words. The article presents the results of a linguistic experiment aimed at identifying semantic components that are relevant for informants, expressed in the interpretations of words received from representatives of two different cultures - Russians and Englishmen. The actual semantic components of the words were analyzed from the point of view of evaluation. The classification of assessments proposed by N. D. Arutyunova was taken as a basis, which was supplemented and revised. The assessment is equally present in the interpretations of Russians and Englishmen, but there are certain differences in the nature of these assessments, reflecting the national and cultural characteristics of representatives of the two societies. The analysis of the experiment results allowed us to reconstruct the evaluative picture of the world in English and Russian societies and to identify the national and cultural specifics of knowledge and personal meanings.