Universal and National Cultural Features of the Naming in Sports

Abstract

The article deals with the issues of nominative processes in sports discourse. The authors describe the features of the sports language picture of the world in the context of the French culture of language, whose key element is the linguistic personality, who acts as the actor of the communicative process related to sports activities (both professional and amateur). The analysis of actual data is based on a linguosemiotic approach to their interpretation, usually within the framework of a discourse statement, as well as at the level of the nominative fund of the national language. The names of sports phenomena are interpreted as vectors of both crosscultural and national cultural characteristics. The identification of the national cultural component of the lexeme in sports theme makes it possible to study sports names from the standpoint of detecting information about national culture, discourse, and languagebased thinking in their semantics. The hypothesis is put forward that the semantics of language units with a sports component reflects the attitude of any linguistic culture to the fundamental concepts of being and thinking, while the methods of sports verbalization can be considered as elements of the language self-identification of the nation. The research prospects are seen in the development of new synergetic cognitive and communicative approaches to the study of language units with a sports component.