DIALECTICS OF THE RUSSIAN NOTION “TOSKA” THROUGH CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS

The article deals with the study of culturally specific associations of the Russian concept "toska". This concept was chosen as a vivid example of cultural specificity related to an abstract notion that reflects the psychological characteristics incorporated into background knowledge of Russian culture. Our investigation follows the traditional interpretation of the concept "toska" as one of the fundamental attributes of Russian cultural psychology. The research is realized through the collocation analysis of frequencies of word combinations statistically processed in the National Corpus of the Russian Language. Our task was to demonstrate that the lexicographic semantic structure of the corresponding word can be verified and supplemented via the associative field of the concept. We also proceeded from the assumption that regular lexical collocability can reveal properties which are not only inferred from the lexical definitions. The results of the analysis are interpreted as objective linguistic evidence for revealing a set of culturally unique semantic properties of the investigated concept. The conclusions summarize a set of such culturally specific features arising from the collocation analysis. Among those we single out properties that constitute a psychological mechanism by means of which Russian language culture forms a model of cognitive perception alongside corresponding psychological type of reactivity.