My thesis presents a semantic study of a number of culturally-specific Russian words in the domains of values, emotions and attitudes that reflect characteristic features of Russian culture. These semantic domains were chosen as the most revealing of people’s understanding of the world, hence most illuminating of the Russian culture and ways of thinking. Among the investigated topics are the following: emotion terms (socuvstvie ‘sympathy’, sostradanie ‘compassion’, sopereživanie ‘empathy’), Russian attitudes and values (terpet’ ‘tolerate/suffer’, terpimyj ‘tolerant’, terpimost’ ‘tolerance’), mental state verbs (scitat’ ‘believe), praise words (molodec, umnica), etc.. To show cultural specificity of these words I draw a comparison between them and their English near-equivalents and explain semantic differences which have their roots in the different cultural ways of thinking. My methodology of analysis is the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) developed by Anna Wierzbicka, Cliff Goddard and colleagues. NSM comprises a set of about 65 indefinable semantic primes and a relatively simple grammar of combinability. NSM allows me formulate meaning of cultural key words with clarity, minimal ethnocentrism and from the insider’s perspective.

2005a. Socuvstvie and sostradanie: a semantic study of two Russian emotions. The Natural Semantic Metalanguage Approach. Lidil. Special issue “Sémantique des noms et adjectifs d’émotion”. 32. 35-47.
2005b. New and Traditional Values in Contemporary Russian. Natural Semantic Metalanguage in Cross-cultural Semantics. In Ilana Mushin (Ed.), Proceedings of the 2004 Conference of the Australian Linguistics Society http://dspace.library.usyd.edu.au:8080/bitstream/123456789/110/1/ALS-20050630-AG.pdf
2005c. In what ways the Russian sopereživanie is different from the English empathy? The natural semantic metalanguage in contrastive semantics. In Kobozeva I., Narin’jani A., Selegej V. (Eds.), Proceedings of the Conference “Dialog-2005”: Computational linguistics and intellectual technologies. Moskva: Nauka. 102-108. (Also available online http://www.dialog-21.ru/Archive/2005/Gladkova%20A/GladkovaA.pdf in Russian)
2003. The semantics of nicknames of the American presidents. In Peter Collins & Mengistu Amberber (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2002 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society. http://www.als.asn.au/