Keywords, Culturemes, Cultural Concepts .......... 11
Synopsis
Two main variants of the term keyword are: (i) in computer science, a word used for indexing the content of documents and in information retrieval; (ii) in linguistics, a word characteristic of a given text, a “thematic word”. A survey of approaches and views is proposed here, with the crucial question of what keywords are actually keys to. They may provide access to an individual text, to the work of an author, to a functional style or a discipline, as well as to the entire national literature or culture. In this latter sense, the notion of keywords largely overlaps with that of culturemes. However, the most promising perspective is to relate keywords to values or axiologically rich “cultural concepts”.