"Is he one of ours?" The cultural semantics and ethnopragmatics of social categories in Russian

Abstract

The study illuminates the meanings of selected Russian social category terms svoj 'one's own', čuzˇoj 'alien/stranger/foreigner', nasˇ 'ours' and ne nasˇ 'not ours' using written and spoken data of the Russian National Corpus. The paper contributes to understanding of Russian relationships and social cognition and establishes connections between the meanings of these terms and selected Russian communicative styles. The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) is used to formulate semantic explications of the terms and cultural scripts.