Культурные особенности американцев (на английским языке)

Scientists consider that the basis for these values are the religious foundations of the mentality – the tremendous role played by Protestantism in the formation of the American character, producing such cultural values as rationalism, practical approach, pragmatism, value of action, asceticism.
Although some of these characteristics are considered as contradicting, they are all present in the American ‘modal’ personality to certain extent.
In the following we will consider some of the values which are considered to be culture-specific for American mentality, American personality and cultural identity.
2.2. American cultural concepts as reflected in the language
One of the key cultural concepts of American mentality is Americanness.
It is a kind of ‘linking’ conception, compensating for the multiculturality of the population, reflecting the idea of common ethos as a system of values which has formed through quite a short (historically) period of time. American authors employ this notion in defining the ‘cementing’ principle of the society:
‘If other Americans reading this account should feel it true, that agreement would only mean that we are alike in our Americanness, … we are a nation, a new breed. The American identity is an exact and provable thing.
High evaluation of national identity is reflected in words (including toponyms, nomens and others) which serve as signposts of Amerinness, for example – Malboro. These ‘national identity’ connotations are widely used in advertising. For example, the manufacturers of Marlboro cigarettes used to have a slogan which read:
‘‘You can take Marlboro out of the country – but you can’t take the country out of Marlboro.’’
Now, what is the specific element (‘‘country’’) that one cannot take out of this particular cigarette? ‘‘Country’’ is a metaphoric expression for qualities inherent in the good country life: clear streams, a reliable horse, country wear (including the ubiquitous Stetson hat) – all of this supposedly incorporated in, and identified with, a particular brand of cigarettes. Inasmuch as ‘‘country’’ represents a particular culture, the slogan tells us that one cannot remove a cultural element which is as ingrained in its context as (supposedly) ‘‘country’’ is in Marlboro, from its natural environment (here, a particular brand of cigarettes).
Reading the Marlboro ad in this way, and disregarding for the moment all implications of political correctness or anti-tobacco sentiment, one could say that ‘‘country,’’ or culture, is intimately tied to the context, the country where it has been ‘‘cultivated,’’ and that for this reason, it is difficult to remove it from its natural surroundings.
Here, the country is understood as representing the broader context in which culture is embedded (as opposed to the preceding section’s ‘‘country,’’ which was said to refer to (a) particular element(s) of a culture). Witnessing the massive movements across continents and across the globe of displaced populations (either because of wars and internal turmoil, or because of economic and climate-related conditions), we may well ask ourselves if we are not looking at global replacements of entire cultures – a phenomenon which of course is not restricted to our times.
But while, for example, the Jewish Diaspora after 70 AD retained its culture despite being deprived of a country, in most other cases, moving a population from its original habitat has resulted in a removal (more or less gradual, depending on the circumstances) of the particular ‘‘country’’ elements inherent in that population, when it moved into the new environment. Well-known examples comprise the influx of immigrants from the Old World into the American Continents, where in most cases the original cultures were amalgamated with the host culture after three generations at most. One tell-tale characteristic of amalgamating cultures is the language change in subsequent generations, from originally monolingual to bilingual to monolingual in the ‘‘new’’ culture: bilingualism is, one could say, the canary in the mine of culture loss.
‘Melting pot’ as America is often called produced the so-called ‘hyphenated cultures’: Chinese-American, Puerto-Rican American, etc. This phenomenon is specific for American society and is reflected in the term ‘twoness’ coined the American publicist W. DuBois:
“Being Chinese-American means nothing to me. I don’t think of myself as being Chinese-American. I am an American, and I am Chinese, I don’t believe that these are mutually exclusive terms which can only meet on some middle ground that is defined as ‘Chinese-American’. I am one, I am the other, and I am both”.
So the concept of ‘twoness’ is a reflection of self-identification through the prism of two national idenitities, doubling of national identity, and finally melting them in a compromising way.
Other key American cultural words connected with the cultural conception of Americanness are farm, ranch, work, earth which semantics contains culturally bound connotations of motherland, ‘small motheland’, place where you were born and brought and acquired the values of your family and – country,
The word ‘ranch is considered to be an Americanism (it is marked as ‘americanism’ in a dictionary). For examples, Longman Dictionary of the English Language and Culture marks this word with the following note, commentin upon the phrase ‘meanwhile, back in the ranch:
‘meanwhile, back in the ranch – a phrase used in old Western when the scene changes to show what is happening at the Ranch (=house) while some of the characters have been away from it. The phrase is often used humorously.’
So the word is semantically associated with ‘home’, ‘family’.
The semantic analysis of the word reveals such meanings which make up its connotations, as diligence, severe natural conditions, fight with the Nature in which Man strives to win, roughness of nature, aggravations of the character, etc.
The concept ‘ranch’ reveals the spirit of America, partially embracing the political sphere. It is considered to be one of the factors preconditioning the success of a political career – the attitude of the electorate to a politician is motivated by his ‘relation’ to ranch’. A person who is not familiar with what ranch is won’t be politically credited in the US. This characteristic feature is described by J. Steinbeck:
When a man makes his fortune in oil or government contracts, in chemicals or wholesale groceries, his first act is to buy a ranch, the largest he can afford, and to run some cattle. A candidate for public office who does not own a ranch is said to have little chance of election. The tradition of the land is deep fixed in the Texas psyche… It would be easy to make sport of their attitude of one did not know that in this way they try to keep their association with the strength and simplicity o the land. Instinctively they feel that this is the source not only of wealth but of energy. And the energy of Texans is boundless and explosive. The successful man with his traditional ranch at least my experience, is no absentee owner. He works at it, oversees his herd and adds to it. The energy, in a climate so hot as to be staggering, is also staggering. And the tradition of hard work is maintained whatever the fortune or lack of it.”
The excerpt involves a number related to ‘ranch’ concepts – land, work, steer, cattleman, heeled boots, etc. The very soul of an American, especially coming form the West is part and parcel of the soil, agrarian culture and concepts and values formed on the basis of it.

Conclusion
The relation between language and thought has fascinated philosophers, poets and linguists for centuries. In German romanticism, this led to the idea of each language containing its own worldview (Weltsight). In America, exposure to the radically different conceptual categories of native American languages further elaborated this idea into the hypothesis of linguistic relativity, also known, after its originators as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
An opposing philosophical view is that of universalism, which holds that human thought is essentially the same all over the world and that this is reflected in language. But in a more modest approach, universalism only claims that there are certain fundamental elements of linguistic meaning which are common to all languages. In recent times, a set of about 60 fundamental meaning elements, known as semantic primes, has been identified. It is hypothesized that these represent universal concepts and this hypothesis is currently being empirically checked in a wide variety of languages. Besides unviversal concepts, a large stock of the lexicon is represented by culture-specific words, which tend to reflect the historical and environmental experience of a people and in the most relevant domains we tend to find lexical elaboration, i.e. a great many specific words for certain phenomena. Cultures tend to express their main norms and values in a number of cultural key words.
One of the key cultural concepts of American English are ‘Americanness’, ‘twoness’, ‘ranch, which are analysed from the point of view of the source of culturally bound values and stereotypes.
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Wierzbicka A. ‘‘Cultural scripts’’: A semantic approach to cultural analysis and cross-cultural communication // Pragmatics and Language Learning / Ed. by L. Bouton, Y. Kachru. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois, 1994. P. 69.
Wierzbicka A. ‘‘Cultural scripts’’: A semantic approach to cultural analysis and cross-cultural communication // Pragmatics and Language Learning / Ed. by L. Bouton, Y. Kachru.Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois, 1994; Goddard C. Thinking across languages and cultures: Six dimensions of variation // Cognitive Linguistics. 2003. Vol. 14. No. 2-3. Pp. 109-140.
Wierzbicka A. ‘‘Cultural scripts’’: A semantic approach to cultural analysis and cross-cultural communication // Pragmatics and Language Learning / Ed. by L. Bouton, Y. Kachru. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois, 1994. P. 72-73.
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Wierzbicka A. ‘‘Cultural scripts’’: A semantic approach to cultural analysis and cross-cultural communication // Pragmatics and Language Learning / Ed. by L. Bouton, Y. Kachru. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois, 1994. P. 83.
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cited in: Wierzbicka A. Semantics: Primes and Universals. Oxford, 1996. P. 338.
Explorations in linguistic relativity / Ed. by M. Pütz and M.H. Verspoor. Amsterdam Studies in the theory and history of linguistic science. Series IV, Current Issues in Linguistic theory. V. 199. – Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2000. P. 34.
Wierzbicka A. Semantics: Primes and Universals. Oxford, 1996; Елизарова Г.В. Культурологическая лингвистика. Опыт исследования понятия в методических целях. СПб, 2000..
Wierzbicka A. Semantics: Primes and Universals. Oxford, 1996.
Степанов Ю.С. Константы. Словарь русской культуры: Опыт исследования. М., 2000.
Багринцева Н.В. Отражение взаимовлияние языков и культур на процессе перевода // Языковые и культурные контакты различных народов. Пенза, 1999. С. 9-10.
Энциклопедический словарь Российской цивилизации. – М., 2001. C. 190.
Бочегова Н.Н. Объективация национально-культурного своеобразия в английском языке США: Автореф. дис. … д-ра филол. наук. СПб., 2006. C. 14.
Бочегова Н.Н. Объективация национально-культурного своеобразия в английском языке США: Автореф. дис. … д-ра филол. наук. СПб., 2006.
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quoted from: Бочегова Н.Н. Объективация национально-культурного своеобразия в английском языке США: Автореф. дис. … д-ра филол. наук. СПб., 2006. C. 16.
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