Reflection of linguistic worldview in figurative comparisons (on the material of Russian language national corpus)

The article reviews figurative comparisons which reflect a linguistic worldview of language speakers, show which concept, being the subject of comparison, requires additional actualization, and on the other hand, which concept, being the object of comparison, has sufficient for such actualization set of distinctive features. The basis on which the subject is compared with the object, may have both denotative and associative character. In the first case, the basis on which the subject is associated with an object is embedded in denotative meaning of the concept itself, which serves as the object of comparison. In the second case, the comparison is built on the individual author’s associative comparison of concepts. Quite often modern Russian speakers use comparisons, the main function of which is not figurative characteristics of matched concepts, and not an increment of meaning, but an emotional attitude to the subject of speech, or action intensification. Such comparisons are referred to desemantized ones.