TIPICAL CONCEPTUALIZATION OF SHAME IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND ANGLO-SAXON CULTURE

Viorica LIFARI Universitatea de Stat din Moldova

Аннотация

In the psychological and socio-linguistic studies devoted to emotion concepts it is often emphasized that the Anglo-Saxon world is a “guilt oriented” culture in comparison with the “shame oriented” collectivistic types of culture. The hypothesis suggested by outstanding researchers who have studied the social emotive concepts made us conduct the given study. In the study we have determined the differences between the individualistic type of culture oriented towards the guilt concept and those of the collectivistic type of culture directed towards shame. More than that, we have focused on the evolution of the culturally specific concept of the Anglo-Saxon world which is “embarrassment” and have determined the cultural contexts and the cognitive scenarios in which “embarrassment” as a lexeme expresses the given concept. We have translated the utterances into Romanian and found out equivalents with a narrower semantic meaning. In order to conduct the research we have used contexts taken from the British National Corpora, which is a database of examples collected from English fiction. Keywords: Anglo-Saxon culture, embarrassment concept, shame concept, guilt concept, cognitive scenario.