Cultural concepts: social context and semantic features

Investigation of dynamics of language in use, representing an important tendency that contributes to forming of modern predominant approach in linguistic science, meets the cherished objective of solving a wide range of issues arising from the functioning of language, which can be efficiently viewed in the context of cognitive approach. In the theoretical framework of the cognitive paradigm of linguistic researches the cognitive approach in translation, as we opine, is to be profiled through the prism of intertextuality and policultural space’s cognitive peculiarities, subjecting the mechanism of discourse perception, comprehension and production to the specificities conditioned, among others, by social, cultural and pragmatic factors of bilingual communication and applying the criteria of the speech act efficiency, supplementing the latter by linguistic and extralinguistic determinants of translation. Cultural concepts in Russian, Spanish and English languages constitute the object of this article. We make special reference to pragmatic features of their functioning as communicative (linguistic and cognitive) means within a dynamic interaction between participants, participants’ conceptual systems and cultures. We highlight the role of such skills as functional generalization and presenting of structures of knowledge by means of categorization and conceptualization that best accord with adequate conveyance of peculiarities of social and cultural experiences of a given language community in unrelated languages. The aim of this article is to compare cognitive and discursive characteristic features of Russian, Spanish and English concepts, to analyze relevant specificities of their functioning in mediated discourse in order to elaborate a strategy designed to preserve implicatures of the source text drawing distinction between specific national and universal features of presuppositions in human interaction while determining the semantic invariant viewed through the prism of translation norm of adequacy and equivalence and the phenomenon of intertextuality. In present article the method of semantic analysis and comparative analysis are used, along with translation method. We come to conclusion that cultural concepts considered per se as universal ways of conceptualizing reality play the role of pragmatic sense markers with additional cognitive effects in mediated discourse that are modelling cognitive processing of conceptual information explicitly or implicitly encoded within the given context of cross-cultural communication. The practical value of this article can be of significant relevance when investigating cognitive and functional aspects of discourse studies in modern linguistics, translation theory, cross-cultural communication, lexicographic studies, and language teaching.