My PhD Research

About the Study

The thesis reported research into non-equivalence between the Russian and English languages, focusing on two lexical units: English ‘sense of privacy’ and Russian ‘dushevnost’, which are conceptually non-equivalent and reciprocally untranslatable. Late Russian-English bilinguals employ five strategies to verbalise them in the other language, and their individual factors affect strategy preference. The study pursued two interconnected lines of enquiry: theoretical and experimental.

The theoretical enquiry revealed that these two concepts are cultural keywords, reflecting contrasting orientations of interpersonal values and interaction practices in their respective communicative cultures. Axiological antithesis makes them mutually de-emphasizing and difficult to transpose into the other language. The absence of ‘dushevnost’ in English was explored through the componential analysis of the Russian expression ‘dushevnaia kompaniia’, an emotion-laden cultural script emphasizing boundary blurring and enmeshment experienced by a group of people. The absence of a ‘sense of privacy’ in Russian was examined through the componential analysis of the English expression ‘to lack privacy’, which denotes a violation of the cultural impetus for personal autonomy and self-determination.

The experimental enquiry analysed the study participants’ strategies to transpose ‘dushevnaia kompaniia’ and ‘to lack privacy’ into the other language in oral narratives. It also explored the bi-directionality of the strategies and interactions between strategy likelihood and the participants’ age, age at the onset and length of L2 English immersion and self-assessed English proficiency. The sample consisted of 228 late Russian-English bilinguals residing in 23 countries. The investigation entailed a multi-step procedure conducted online.

The findings showed that the participants used five strategies: transference, approximation, avoidance, circumlocution and repetition. An increased likelihood of using the sub-strategy of transference, conceptual filler, was associated with the bilinguals’ metalinguistic awareness of conceptual non-equivalence. It comes with high proficiency in both languages and deep immersion in both cultures—combinatorially referred to as metacultural multicompetence.