Opposition educated person / uneducated person as the object of description in the linguocultural dictionary of concepts

The whole set of ideas about scholarship as an intellectual and social quality of people is an importantpart of the conceptual world picture and the language world picture. In particular, it is proved by the sizeable number of languagemeans of representation of the opposition educated person/uneducated person. There are lexical - including synonymic - means ofrepresentation of this opposition, and also phraseological and proverbial ones. The description of this opposition proposed in the articlewas made by working on the project of the Linguocultural Dictionary of Concepts under the supervision of Prof. L. Babenko. As thestudy showed, the concepts educated person and uneducated person are structured similarly, but not identically; the differencesconcern either the number of representations, or information they express. The main cognitive feature of these concepts is asymmetry.Educated means high or very high degree of manifestation of this quality, whereas uneducated means insufficient or zero degree.Near-kernel cognitive features are retrieved, first of all, from the meanings and the role structures of words - base representations of theconcepts, and also from the standard contextual circumference. On the one hand, the opposition education / lack of education is conceptualisedas an intellectual quality. On the other hand, it is conceptualised as a socially important quality. Besides, the other near-kernelcognitive feature of the considered concepts is the concretisation in terms of presence of retro-situation: for the concept educatedthere is a way of getting education, for the concept uneducated there is a case of lack of education. In the nearest periphery of theseconcepts the sphere education crosses with the spheres general social notions and categories, professional and labour activities,science, and in the superposed cognitive features these concepts are structured symmetrically. The peripheral features of these conceptsare, first of all, metaphors like light / darkness, richness, value, strength, energy / weakness, static nature. National-culturaland appraisal peripheral features are represented, first of all, in the semantics of proverbs. Scholarship is appraised from the utilitarianpoint of view, because it does good to somebody, it gives him/her an advantage over an uneducated person. There may be a negativeappraisal, because mastering of knowledge is connected with difficulties and entails responsibility. So, the concurrent research of meansof representation of concepts educated and uneducated makes it possible to see their opposition and correlation.

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