The intense of cross-cultural, or intercultural, contacts require the study of mental images which exist in different cultures. The difference of such images are known to cause misunderstanding and conflicts of various types, i.e. racial, personal, religious, political, etc. As far as language serves the key to understand one's national mentality, it seems necessary to analyze its means of expression via words or phrases. The current investigation is aimed to perform a general survey of

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... ic works that are devoted to crosscultural researches of communicative units. In order to clarify the main approaches of the studying concept its authors present notions of markedness and unmarkedness, culturally marked and unmarked vocabulary. The work singles out nationally-specific components that can be observed in the vocabulary of a certain cultural community: stable elements of culture, traditional household sphere, everyday habits, artistic culture and national world's view. These components are relatively reflected in a number of culturally marked language units which are distributed among three main semantic groups: connotative vocabulary, non-equivalent vocabulary, background vocabulary. The results of the present paper can be applied for further researches in the field of language contacts, discourse theory, language semantics, intercultural communication, comparative linguistics, lunguacultural and ethnocultural disciplines.