Russian semantics in typological perspective. Some comments on the concept 'linguistic model of the world'

The paper attempts to rehabilitate the concept of a 'linguistic model of the world', used by a number of linguists in Eastern Europe. This concept arouses suspicion, and sometimes an active rejection by some scholars in Western Europe, due to a negative attitude towards the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which asserts a dependence of human mental categories from the conceptual grid of their native language. The paper demonstrates that the linguistic model of the world is nothing more than a semantic system of a language, considered in a typological perspective. It is a useful tool for describing some types of divergencies in semantic systems of different languages, as well as a number of phenomena in language evolution, language contact and crosscultural communication. The language model of the world deals with the part of the semantics of a language, which is inaccessible to direct observation: it can only be reconstructed by means of linguistic analysis. The concept of the linguistic model of the world that is used in the framework of the Moscow School of cultural semantics is not intended to be applied to the investigation of the structure of the human mind.