Semantic Barrier to Cross-Cultural Communication (drawn on the English and Russian languages)
The present article is concerned with the semantic barrier to cross-cultural communication as one of potential problems participants of the dialogue between English and Russian native speakers might be faced with due to the latter’s overlooking the specifically English, culturally-determined speech patterns, on the one hand, and the entirely different associations that arise in the minds of representatives of two cultural backgrounds while using idiomatic expressions, on the other. The problem of equivalence of frequently used idioms is believed to be extremely important for linguistic research. There’s been an analogy drawn between a number of English idiomatic expressions characteristic of different contexts and some of their Russian equivalents on the semantic level of the language. The dictionary entries of the idioms are illustrated by examples from up-to-date speech in British English.