Value as a Basic Concept of Cross-Cultural Researches

The goal of the study is to determine the characteristics of the concept “value” as a key concept in cross-cultural scientific research. This goal is achieved by the authors in two stages. At the first stage, a comparative analysis of data from dictionaries of national languages - Russian, Vietnamese, Danish and Finnish - is presented. The task of the analysis is to search for and understand the main components of the concept “value”, with which the formation of the linguistic conceptualization of the Russian word “value”, Vietnamese “giá trị”, Danish “værdi” and Finnish “arvo” begins. At the second stage, speech utterances are analyzed. The material was speech utterances of native speakers of the compared linguacultures. The material was taken from Internet sites where online reviews and / or comments are published. The main method at this stage was interpretive analysis, which involves searching, perceiving, understanding and describing linguacultural facts from the standpoint of the research objectives. The novelty and relevance of the research presented in this article is connected with the peculiarity of the approach to the object of consideration: cross-cultural studies of values are a widespread and established method of cognition for such scientific disciplines as, first of all, linguacultural studies, intercultural communication, linguaxiology, but the goal of the presented cross-cultural study is to understand the concept of “value” itself, to find those characteristics of this concept that explain its key role in the task of studying the trinity of language, culture and consciousness. The authors come to the conclusion about the existence of special parameters in the description of the concept “value”: 1) it is a super-concept, which includes all concepts in its image component; 2) it is an antinomic concept; 3) it has a super-value plan of expression, realized through the concept of the priceless. Moreover, the study found the presence in the content of the concept “value” of the trinity in the categories “not valuable” - “valuable” - “priceless”, which implies a strict hierarchy of the structure, ascending vertically from the material “no value/price” to the ideal “that which cannot be assessed/evaluated”.