Axiological features of opposition 'light - heavy' in Russian

The axiological function analysis of a binary opposition is one of the methods to study cognitive mechanisms of human evaluative activity. A binary opposition is a pair of opposite concepts, reflecting objective reality phenomena, their options and properties, used as a metaphor by a language community to evaluate non-physical spheres of human activity. Being important for an ancient native speaker as attributes of rituals and myths, these oppositions define cognitive and speech activity and make a special grid of references which make the world around us clear. The author analyses the peculiarities of one of the key axiological metaphorical binary oppositions 'light - heavy' as a marker in the process of reality evaluation. She describes the design features of its semantic space highlighting the metaphorical meaning which is especially important for complex axiological processes. A careful look at the data from Russian Explanatory dictionaries and texts containing language units of the opposition 'light - heavy' represented in the Russian National Corpus shows that its components reflect complex relationships between participants of a perceptual situation. Its metaphorical picture is based on the condition of comfort and discomfort which a person feels when interacting with an object having a small or big weight. The author allocates and characterizes types of evaluation which people express using this opposition. Evaluation is aesthetic when perceiving the external features of a person (features, gait, results of activity): light means "graceful", heavy "rough". Gnoseological evaluation concerns cognitive abilities of a person (ability or inability to understand something): light as "easy to understand", heavy as "hard to understand". The emotional evaluation shows feelings of a person from perception of different aspects of life: light as "causing positive emotions, pleasant"; heavy as "causing negative emotions, unpleasant". The author comes to a conclusion that the studied axiological metaphorical binary opposition 'light - heavy' fits into the overall worldview coordinate system consisting of the space ('up - down'), time ('spring - autumn'), color ('white - black'), temperature ('hot - cold') and other oppositions which help people to understand the dynamics of the world around them.

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