Abstract:
This article focuses on the basic tasks of linguistic research, with particular emphasis on contrastive phraseological linguocultural studies. The author presents one of the possible classifications of phraseological units which reflect various manifestations of culture. Examples from Polish, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Russian, Spanish and Italian are presented. As the conceptual nature of phraseological images makes them “operators” or “cells” of cultural memory, special attention has been paid to phraseological culturemes (phraseoculturemes) as devices of coding cultural content that reveal a particular picture of the world and the specific worldview of a cultural community and are linked to cultural codes. Starting from the concept of “cultural memory”, the author demonstrates that the phraseological meaning is a complex semantic and conceptual formation that is able to reflect different historical modes of acquiring knowledge about the world, and thus preserves particular types of cultural information. The main idea of the article is the assumption that contrastive linguocultural studies in the field of phraseology make it possible to identify discrepancies in the process of semiosis across linguistic communities and to explain national differences captured in the imagery of phraseological units.