10.The ration thinkers' idea on universal human concepts (Leibniz, Descartes, Pascal)

It is clear, that if we are to find truly universal human concepts, we must look for them not in the world around us but in our own minds.

Leibniz believed that every human being is born with a set of innate ideas which become activated and developed by experience but which latently exist in our minds from the beginning. These ideas are so clear to us that no explanation can make them any clearer.On the contrary, we interpret all our experience through them.

Leibniz called those ideas with which, he believed, every human being was born "the alphabet of human thoughts". All complex thoughts - all meanings - arise though different combination of simple ideas, just as written sentences and written words arise though different combinations of letters from the alphabet.

Rene Descartes suggested that the lexicon of a universal language should consist of primitive elements. The systematic combination of these elements, according to syntactical rules, would generate "an infinity of different words."

Natural Semantic Metalanguage

The central idea of this theory, supported by extensive empirical investigations by a number of researchers, is that despite their enormous diversity, allnatural languages share a common core: a small vocabulary of 60 or so''conceptual primes''and a''universalgrammar''(the combinatory properties of the primes). The set of universal conceptual primes includes elements such as SOMEONE, SOMETHING, PEOPLE, GOOD, BAD, KNOW, THINK, WANT, FEEL, and so on.

Linguists of the NSM school rely on semantic primitives (or semantic primes) for analysis (that is, simple, indefinable, and universally lexicalized concepts) and reductive paraphrase (that is, breaking complex concepts down into simpler concepts).

12.Key words and core cultural values

Key words are words which are particularly important and revealing in a given language. How can one justify the claim that a particular word is one of a culture `s key words? To begin with, one may want to establish (with or without the help of a frequency dictionary) that the word in question is common word, not a marginal word. One may also want to establish that the word in question (whatever it is overall frequency) is very frequently used in one particular semantic domain, for example, in the domain of emotions, or domain of moral judgments. Furthemore one may want to show that this word is at the center of a whole phraseological cluster, such as the following one in the case of Russian word dusa. Na duse (on the soul), v duse (in the soul), otvesti dusu (to relieve one `s soul), otkryt dusu (to open one` s soul), izlit dusu (to pour out one `s soul). One may also be able to show that the proposed key word occurs frequently in proverbs, in sayings, in popular songs, in book titles and so on.

A key word such as dusa (soul) or sudba (fate) in Russian is like one loose end which we have managed to find it a tangled ball of wool: by pulling it, we may be able to unravel a whole tangled ball of attitudes , values, and expectations, embodied not only in words, but also in common collocation, in set phrases, in grammatical constructions, in proverbs and so on. For example sudba leads us to other fate-related words such suzdeno, smirenie, uchast and rok, to collocations such as udary sudby (blows of fate), and to set of phrases such as nichego ne podelaes (you can `t do anything) , to grammatical constructions, to numerous proverbs and so on.