PERCEPTION OF BEAUTY IN ENGLISH-SPEAKING CULTURE

Abstract

Annotation: The concept of "beauty" exists in any culture, being one of the cultural universals, but understanding of beauty, criteria of beauty, attitude to it is specific in different linguocultural communities due to perception varieties. The paper is devoted to peculiarities of the concept “beauty” in the English-speaking culture. Perception refers to the internal process by which we select, evaluate, and organize the stimuli of the outside world. Taking into account the fact that perception of beauty is both subjective and culturally determined, we have selected aphorisms, containing the concept of “beauty” and on the basis of their complex interpretative linguistic analysis, have organized them into several groups with the purpose of defining linguocultural peculiarities of the concept “beauty” among British and American famous people. The analysis of 131 aphorisms about beauty, has allowed to identify 7 main images of the concept “beauty” and to make a conclusion about metaphorical and axiological components of the concept. The main images of the concept are: happiness, woman, time, ideal, something useless, test, truth. Most aphorisms (93%) position beauty as a positive value and only 7% of aphorisms note the worthlessness, uselessness and futility of beauty. The study allows us to state that the concept of “beauty” is characterized by a high degree of abstraction, and rich semantic content. The study of the concept helps to understand the peculiarities of the perception of beauty by representatives of English-speaking culture.