BASIC CULTURAL CONCEPTS IN THE AZERBAIJAN LANGUAGE

The term “concept” is widely used in many humanities sciences: philosophy, linguistics, psychology, cultural studies, and others. The study of the nature and structure of the concept is an important and relevant issue in contemporary linguistics. Linguistics studies the semantic structure of the concept as a cognitive notion and the peculiarities of its modeling and objectification through linguistic means. Some concepts, which reflect both universal and national values at the same time, are referred to as basic, or key, for a particular culture. The article deals with the specificity of AILӘ (“family”), EV (“home”), VӘTӘN (“homeland”), and QEYRӘT (“honor”) concepts basic for Azerbaijani and other Turkic languages. The AILӘ concept in the Azerbaijani language is connected with the notion of “hearth”. The EV concept is objectified in lexemes with the semantics “nest”, “region”, “village”, “city”. All of the above concepts are, at the same time, components of another basic, broader concept VӘTӘN. The system of basic concepts forms the main components of the worldview, reflecting the national distinctiveness of a person`s perception of reality. A person lives not only in a world composed of things and objects but also in a world of concepts, consisting of their intellectual, spiritual, and social needs