„Sprachkontakte“ aus der Sicht der kontrastiven Linguokulturologie

Abstract The problem of language contacts has two main perspectives: as an interaction of several codes being quasi-independent actors and as interaction of two languages in the consciousness of a concrete individual – mostly the mother tongue and a foreign language. In this article, the second approach is advocated. As the mother tongue (“own language”) acts the Russian, and the German – as the foreign (“alien”) language. With language contacts of this kind (foreign language acquisition, interlingual/intercultural communication, translation), certain differences between the contact languages come to light. They are described from the point of view of contrastive linguoculturology – a discipline that is located in the overlapping zone between conventional contrastive linguistics and linguoculturology, which has been developing rapidly in recent times, especially in the former USSR. The notion linguocultural “contrast” is proposed for the role of the basic unit of this discipline: it is binary and composed of a “special x ” and a “lacunae y ” (contrast x↔y = special x + lacunae y ). Three types of contrasts are distinguished: (1) system-linguistic, (2) discursive and (3) cultural.