‘Intimate’ Talk in Russian: Human Relationships and Folk Psychotherapy

Abstract

The paper explores and describes communicative aspects of ‘intimate’ relations in Russian. Using data from the Russian National Corpus, it illuminates the meanings of the social category terms drug ‘close friend’, rodnye ‘dear/kin’ and blizkie ‘close (ones)’ and demonstrates their relationship to the culturally salient terms duša ‘soul, heart’ and sokrovennyj ‘innermost, dear, hidden’. The paper contributes to understanding of Russian relationships and social cognition and establishes connections between the meanings of these terms and selected Russian ways of talking. The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) is used to formulate semantic explications of the terms and cultural scripts.

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