Interconnection of language and mentality
Interconnection of language and mentality is not only reflected in the vocabulary of a language. But it should be noted that the grammatical structure of a language more exactly reflects the mentality of a nation as it is closer to thinking and gives an idea of the inner organization of thinking.
The grammatical (morphological) categories are normally formed in any language as a result of long generalization of the concrete lexical material, the further abstracting of a certain semantic idea.
Within the frame work of my research was made an attempt to compare very important for the English and Russian languages grammatical categories.
Descriptions |
English language |
Russian language |
Word order If you change word order the meaning of the sentence can be distorted or lost in English language. |
- fixed the paper book – бумажная книга (книга на бумажном носителе); paper the book – заверните (эту) книгу (в бумагу) book the paper – зарегистрируйте (эту) газету / статью (в картотеке). It shows British practicality and concreteness. |
-flexible word order 1. Я люблю тебя 2. Я тебя люблю 3. Люблю я тебя 4. Люблю тебя я 5. Тебя я люблю 6. Тебя люблю я |
Meaning |
- expressed through the addition of words (for example auxiliaries) and movement of words within limited boundaries e.g. Practice makes perfect. I practice English every day. Sam likes English. Does Sam like English? |
- conveys meaning largely through changes in the composition of words and intonation (e.g., by inflections or the addition of prefixes and suffixes) Сэм любит английский. Сэм любит английский?
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Phonology |
- English has 12 vowel sounds (5 long, 7 short), plus 8 diphthongs; - consonants are pronounced with intention mostly; - intonation is according to the type of sentence or phrase with fixed word order; - has variable stress patterns.
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- Russian consists of 5 vowel sounds, with no differentiation between short and long vowels; - Russian has a similar number of consonants to English, but their sounds do not fully overlap, Russian consonant can be both hard and soft what makes difficulty in pronunciation; - intonation may change the sentence from narrative to interrogative type with the same word order; - has variable stress patterns. |
Grammar - Verb/Tense |
English has progressive and perfect tense forms, and avoids the need for affixation or inflection by the extensive use of auxiliaries; - the modal verb system in English is very complex; - there are 24 tenses. Because British analytical character they have |
The Russian system is based in the concept of aspect: actions are either completed or not completed. This is shown by appending affixes to the verb stem. - there are 3 tenses. |
Grammar - Other |
- the English article system itself is extremely complex; to use it correctly in English speech, we need to understand the way of realizing English’ view on the object. We use THE when we talk about particular subject, but ‘a/an’ when we just introduce subject to listener. There is a book. The book is written by Dostoevsky. - in English all inanimate objects are the same gender “it”. |
- Russian has no articles; - all Russian nouns are one of three genders no mater if it is animate or inanimate object. |
For example It is well known that the category of gender is one of the important categories of the Russian language. This category divides all the names, objects into 3 gender groups. It is not difficult for native speakers of Russian to define the gender characteristics of the nouns, while for British to learn the rules of gender characteristics is one of the complicated tasks.