СULTURAL KEYWORDS AND FALSE EQUIVALENCE AS COGNITIVE AND LINGUOCULTURAL PHENOMENA IN LINGUISTICS

The article examines cultural keywords as a critical, yet methodologically challenging, area of Russian vocabulary teaching in Uzbekistan. The central problem is “false equivalence”: learners identify a Russian word with an apparently matching Uzbek translation, but the cultural script, evaluative component, and pragmatic boundaries do not coincide. As a result, students produce grammatically correct utterances that sound culturally inappropriate or semantically reduced. The paper proposes a corpus-informed and classroom-validated model for teaching cultural keywords through contrastive cultural scripting, collocational profiling, and discourse-function annotation. A staged procedure is presented: selecting keywords from course texts, verifying lexicographic meanings, extracting typical contexts, modelling cultural scenarios, designing micro-tasks for learner discovery, and refining explanations using diagnostic feedback. The paper argues that systematic work with cultural keywords improves reading interpretation, pragmatic accuracy, and intercultural competence, particularly in academic and media discourse.