Deconstructing the linguacultural underpinnings of tolerance: Anglo-Slavonic perspectives

Abstract

Abstract The cross-cultural study of the words defining social values are of particular importance in interdisciplinary contexts, as the knowledge of their culture-specific semantic as well as discursive characteristics contributes to a better understanding of how people think and act in a society. The paper focuses on the English lexeme tolerance and its translation equivalents in Russian and Serbian. It aims to specify linguacultural characterizations of the notion of tolerance in British, Russian and Serbian cultures. The data were taken from dictionaries, British National Corpus (BNC), Russian National Corpus (RNC), Corpus of Contemporary Serbian (SrpKor), as well as media and Internet resources. The combined methodology (pragma-semantic, discourse and lingua-cultural analysis) enabled us to reveal that the dictionary equivalents of the English lexeme tolerance are not complete, but partial. The findings show that in Russian and Serbian the words of Latin etymology tolerantnost’ and tolerancija seem to invoke both positive and negative attitudes, reflecting cultural norms and values. The paper contributes to the understanding of tolerance in the observed linguacultures and confirms that it is important to consider interdisciplinary approaches to language studies.