The modern approach of studying English vocabulary

Abstract

The article deals with theoretical and practical problems of contrastive linguistics, as one of the areas of comparative linguistics. The goal of language contrastive description is revealing the national peculiarities of linguistic mentality. The analysis was based on Russian and English lexemes denoting speech events. The use of formalized parameters in the form of indices is described to identify the degree of similarity of language correspondences. The contrastive method of lexemes description allows to reveal quite clearly and authentically semantic equivalence in the two languages. Contrastive linguistics directly related to the theory and practice of translation and is important for the practice of compiling bilingual dictionaries.