The Linguocultural Type ‘Business Man’ in the Russian and English Linguoculture: Research Approaches

The article examines the linguocultural type ‘business person’ in Russian and English (English-American) linguocultures. The linguocultural type ‘business person’ is composite in both cultures; it includes two subtypes, ‘entrepreneur’ and ‘top manager’. Using examples from the Corpus of Contemporary American English, the use of the phrases business man and a man of business is examined, their frequency is assessed, and a conclusion is drawn about the equivalence of their semantics to the dictionary meanings of the lexeme businessman. Small degree of their semantic differentiation in the context of a sentence and even a paragraph is attested. In contrast to the Russian language, where the phrase деловой человек as the name of a type has no obvious synonyms, in the English language the elements of the nominative field are businessman/business man, a man of business, as well as the gender-neutral politically correct businessperson/business person and businesspeople/business people.