LINGUOCULTOROLOGICAL SPECIFICITY OF THE EMOTIONAL CONCEPT "LONELINESS" IN THE BRITISH AND RUSSIAN LANGUAGE PICTURES OF THE WORLD

The article is devoted to the structure of the emotional concept ОДИНОЧЕСТВО/LONELINESS, in the British and Russian language pictures of the world. Since language is a key component of culture, linguistic units are treated as exponents of the national and cultural specifics of linguistic consciousness. The growing interest in the phenomenon of "loneliness" is one of the trends in the development of the modern world. Changes in the social sphere during the COVID-19 pandemic brought the problem of loneliness to a new, critical level.Analysis of such linguistic means as metaphorical units, paremiological, aphoristic and phraseological expressions allow us to determine the cultural specificity of linguistic units. The concept contains a certain set of interrelated functions, which are distinguished as cognitive and figurative-evaluative parts. Thus, the structure of emotional concepts usually includes conceptual, imaginative and evaluative components.One of the methods for studying the conceptual component of the concept is the component analysis of the words-objectivators of the concept. The component analysis of the following lexemes was carried out: ‘сиротство', ‘разобщенность', ‘isolated', ‘solitude', ‘solitary'. The figurative and evaluative characteristics of ОДИНОЧЕСТВО/LONELINESS in Russian and English were also considered. The evaluative component has a significant impact on the formation of connotative meaning. It was found that both figurative and evaluative components have a significant impact on the formation of the connotative meaning of the lexeme "loneliness".The conducted research has shown that in the considered linguocultures, the emotional concept ОДИНОЧЕСТВО/LONELINESS has a similar structure and content in general. However, there is a certain variability in its representation, which is associated with its national specifics. The identified similarities in the verbalization of the concept under consideration allow the possibility of an equivalent translation. It is important to note that there is much in common in expressing loneliness in the two linguistic pictures of the world. Therefore, depending on the context, the lexeme loneliness acquires its own individual meaning.