One of the central directions of linguistic research of social and cultural condition of language is linguistic and country studies.
Linguistic country studies can be defined as studying the culture of a country in parallel with the study of the language itself. The subject of linguocountry studies is culture as expressed in the language under study.
On the one hand, this direction was formed under the influence of the solved problem of the correlation between language and culture, and on the other hand, its appearance was conditioned by purely pragmatic preconditions - the approach to the teaching of a foreign language as a means of communication, the need to study the language in close connection with the culture of the country in which the language is used.
Representatives of this area of study of social and cultural conditionality of the language focus on the study of the meaning of the word. They proceed from the fact that a word is, first of all, a designation, a sign of this or that life reality and therefore in its semantics it is possible to find and allocate some "extra-linguistic" content which directly and directly reflects the culture served by the language. Thus, it is through the meaning that the connection of lexical units with the extra-linguistic reality is carried out.
N.G. Komlev was the first Russian linguist to introduce the concept of cultural-historical component of meaning into linguistics. He suggested that a word reflecting the object or phenomenon of reality of a certain society not only means it, but also creates a certain background associated with this word. Therefore, the semantics of a word should contain a component that fixes exactly this social background in which the word exists.
"Acknowledging the presence of "internal content of the word", that is, the fact that the word sign expresses something other than itself, we must recognize the presence of a cultural component - the dependence of the semantics of language on the cultural environment of the individual".
The study of the cultural component of words is an important condition for the successful mastering of a foreign language, but, in turn, it is part of a wider range of cultural and historical meanings of the corresponding social reality, the mastering of which is an important condition for the use of language as a means of communication. Thus, for example, O.S.Akhmanova notes that a prerequisite for the implementation of any communicative act should be "mutual knowledge of the realities between the speakers and listeners, which is the basis of language communication", they have been called "background knowledge" in linguistics.
According to her correct remark,
"the meaning of the word used in this native language to denote such completely different from the point of view of the Central European culture objects as "egg", "dead" and "bread" will really be revealed only to the one who acquires an external linguistic acquaintance with these objects in a given cultural field and will see that the egg-shaped form is given not only to the bread, but also to the bodies of the deceased at burial".
Background knowledge, as the main object of linguocountry studies, is considered in their works by E.M.Vereshagin and V.G.Kostomarov. The names of these significant scientists are associated with the formation of domestic linguocountry studies as an independent science, which in my opinion, to consider only a part of linguodidactics would not be quite correct. Of course, it cannot be denied that all the achievements of linguocountry studies meet the goals and objectives of the methods of teaching foreign languages and are now widely used. However, we cannot underestimate the fact that having laid the theoretical foundation for linguocountry studies, E.M. Vereshagin and V.G. Kostomarov have touched upon such a wide range of problems, on which scientists from different fields of knowledge are currently working: linguists, psychologists, psycholinguists, sociologists, sociolinguists.
Thus, according to V.G.Tomakhin, the main object of linguocountry studies are the background knowledge of the members of a certain linguistic and ethnic community, so the problems solved in this science partially cover the problems of sociolinguistics.
E.M. Vereshchagin and V.G. Kostomarov were the first scientists to scientifically substantiate the objectivity of the existence of background knowledge, they discovered the cumulative function of lexical semantics, and the content of the cumulative function of language, according to which - language units are a "reservoir" of knowledge of human befallen social realit
Their merit lies in the fact that they discovered the linguistic nature of the background knowledge. They have shown on numerous examples that semantics of a word is not limited to one lexical concept.
Linguistics science has a lot of unresolved issues, a significant part of which is problematic. Their complexity and multi-dimensionality does not allow to give all exhaustive answers and to develop a certain point of view. Probably, for this reason, there is some inconsistency in the opinions of the authors.
T.D. Tomakhin, having offered a certain gradation of background knowledge, pointed out that the main object of country studies is knowledge related to national culture, inherent in a certain ethnic and linguistic community. The author does not consider it possible to present the background knowledge in a systematic way, because it is not hierarchically ordered, for example, in comparison with scientific knowledge, but is remembered and reproduced by the brightness of impressions.
E.M.Vereshchagin and V.G.Kostomarov approached this problem in a more differentiated way. They classified the content of the semantic shares of a word in a certain way, dividing them into exoteric (external) and esoteric (internal) ones, and pointing out that in the process of semanticizing the lexical background the words are to be described exactly by esoteric shares, while the exoteric shares, though included in the lexical background of the word, are rather outside its semantics.
Having developed general theoretical and methodological aspects of linguocountry studies, E.M. Vereshagin and V.G. Kostomarov opened up new prospects for the development of educational lexicography. They pointed out that
"it is advisable to carry out the semanticization of the lexical background of words as a member of a thematic group, because with this approach the words appear in homogeneous sets and are remembered in their contrasts and combinations".
The foregoing shows that over the past two decades there has been some progress in the study of the social conditioning of language. Whereas earlier the statements of linguistic scholars of the social essence of language were more of a declarative nature, now there is a concrete direction of research.