Specific aspects of associative and cultural background of the proper noun Smolensk Region in the Russian National Corpus

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the functioning of the heading regional proper noun Smolensk Region in the nationwide onomastic space presented in the Russian National Corpus. This work constitutes an interdisciplinary research performed in the tideway of high-priority and promising areas of contemporary linguistics, i.e. cultural linguistics and corpus linguistics. The relevancy of studying proper nouns as carriers of wealthy historical and cultural information about people’s life sweepingly rose early in the 21 century, in the era of globalism with impetuous trends to unification of national cultures. In our opinion, it is reasonable to start an impartial description of the nationwide onomastic space by studying the regional proper nouns systems that form such a space (we hereby propose the analysis of the Smolensk onomastic material). The approach used in this work may be applied for analyzing other regional onomastic arrays. Not only do the results of such studies have a wide scope of application (making dictionaries and guidance books), but are also of practical significance both for obtaining region-oriented background knowledge by representatives of concrete regional society, and for the structuring and authentic description of national onomasticon.

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