ON INTERCULTURAL ASPECTS OF CONCEPT “WEALTH” INTERPRETATION IN PRESENT TIME PERSPECTIVE

. The issue of gaining and retaining wealth as an equivalent of success, prosperity, stability and often freedom has become more and more discussed in various foreign media and fictional discourses created by contemporary English-speaking authors, representing the concept of “wealth” in close correlation with other mental structures and adopting modern interpretative approaches to the disclosure of its content in the paradigm of life and value systems of modern English-speaking communicants. The concept of “wealth” is one of the most important mental categories having a different degree of significance in different linguistic cultures, which makes it crucial in studying the processes of conceptualizing the world as one of the most promising areas of modern communicative linguistics, the theory of intercultural communication in particular. To achieve this goal, we described the features of the objectivization of this concept on the example of the fictional discourse by K. Swan and J. Archer and also by analyzing the corpus of phraseological units preserving “wealth” in their semantics. The investigation of the fictional discourse and phraseological units in terms of representation of "wealth" that is culturally predetermined made it necessary to resort to the descriptive method, the comparative and conceptual methods of study. Thus, in the English folk culture, in particular in proverbs, sayings and phraseological units, one can trace the main associative series with the concept of "wealth": wealth equals power; wealth is food; wealth is money; wealth is ruining; wealth spoils the character of a man; wealth is a master. The value component of the concept of "wealth" in the English linguistic culture is complex and includes both positive and explicit negative connotations. Highlighted specific semantic elements of the concept of "wealth", characterizing the perception of this phenomenon by native English speakers at the present stage of development of society, made it possible to establish the relevance of this mental structure for the theory of intercultural communication on the basis of fictional discourse. The following semantic associations were discovered: wealth – power; wealth – money, material values; wealth is a well-paid job; wealth – status – respect; wealth is food; wealth – household items (cars, clothes, etc.); wealth – thirst for profit, greed; wealth is luxury; wealth is uniqueness; wealth is the economic well-being of a country.