Vital code as a way to realize figurative signs of the macroconcepts ‘zemlya’ and ‘earth / land’ in Russian and English linguistic cultures

The paper describes figurative signs of the macroconcepts zemlya and earth / land from the aspect of the vital code of linguistic culture. The vital code is represented in metaphors of a living being. The purpose of the article is to define a set of vital signs of the macroconcepts zemlya and earth / land. The objectives of the study are as follows: 1. to provide a brief overview of the existing studies concerning the vital code; 2. to identify and compare the vital signs of zemlya and earth / land macroconcepts in the collected language material. The subject of the study is language constructions including the words zemlya and earth /land and containing metaphors of a living being. The object of the study is the vital code of Russian and English linguistic cultures. As to the current scientific relevance of the study, the means of expressing the macroconcepts zemlya and earth / land presented in the compared linguistic cultures are analyzed in terms of two principles - anthropomorphism and vitality. The study is novel in that the macroconcepts zemlya and earth / land are first considered within codes of linguistic culture. The main methods of research are descriptive, conceptual, comparative, interpretative. The study material was selected from the Russian National Corpus (www.ruscorpora.ru) and Oxford Text Archive (https://ota.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/repository/xmlui/). As the study showed, the identified vital signs can be grouped into four blocks: 1. Physiological signs (‘voicelessness’, ‘disease’, ‘age’, ‘voice’, ‘movement’, ‘breathing’, ‘shaking’, ‘health’, ‘beauty’, ‘feeding’, ‘drinking’, ‘strength’, ‘weakness’, ‘sleep’). 2. Ontological signs (‘birth,’ ‘life’, ‘death’). 3. Perceptual signs (‘hearing’, ‘vision’, ‘touch’). 4. Somatic signs (‘legs’, ‘hands’, ‘lips’, ‘eyebrows’, ‘head’, ‘lap’, ‘breast’, ‘face’, ‘body’, ‘womb’, ‘blood’, ‘bowels’). Codes of linguistic culture are universal: they are presented in the descriptions of different fragments of the world. The vital signs represented in zemlya and earth / land concept structures are almost identical. However, the specific quantity of metaphors that implement them is different.