‘Intimate’ Talk in Russian: Human Relationships and Folk Psychotherapy

Abstract

The paper explores and describes communicative aspects of ‘intimate’ relations in Russian. Using data from the Russian National Corpus, it illuminates the meanings of the social category terms drug ‘close friend’, rodnye ‘dear/kin’ and blizkie ‘close (ones)’ and demonstrates their relationship to the culturally salient terms duša ‘soul, heart’ and sokrovennyj ‘innermost, dear, hidden’. The paper contributes to understanding of Russian relationships and social cognition and establishes connections between the meanings of these terms and selected Russian ways of talking. The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) is used to formulate semantic explications of the terms and cultural scripts.

Keywords:

• Cultural Scripts
• NSM
• Russian
• Social Cognition
• Social Categories

Notes

¹ In earlier forms of English, friend had a ‘stronger’ meaning than in contemporary English (Wierzbicka 1997: 35–39). This is still reflected in sayings such as ‘A friend in need is a friend indeed’ (attributed to Benjamin Franklin).

² The translations of the RNC examples are mine.

³ Versta is an old Russian measure of length, equals approximately 1 kilometre.

⁴ Pood is an old Russian measure of weight, equals 16.8 kg.

⁵ Wierzbicka (1997: 63) includes the component ‘nothing bad will happen because of this’, after component (g). This could be considered relevant in Soviet times, but it is unlikely that it should be posited for the present-day use of drug.

⁶ In the following examples from the RNC oral subcorpus, ‘/’ marks a pause.

⁷ Duševnyj is an adjective derived from duša.