Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to identify the concepts “wealth” and “poverty” in Kazakh folk tales as linguistic representations of folk cognition. Linguocultural analysis revealed cultural information in a historical and ethnographic context, ancient folk knowledge, and allowed us to recognise the linguistic character. Wealth and poverty as a binary opposition were considered from the point of view of world outlook and cognition of the world, moral and ethical norms in the period of formation of ethnos consciousness in the fairy tale era and compared with the mental life of the people at the present stage. As the material of the study 31 household fairy tales were taken. The linguistic units representing these concepts were selected from fairy tale texts. A free associative experiment was conducted, in which the representation of these concepts in modern youth language was compared with fairy tale language. Wealth was defined as a material and spiritual concept, language representations were considered in binary opposition with poverty and it was argued that poverty and wealth come from the mind, not from property. When comparing the results of the free associative experiment, it was found that both material and spiritual values underwent a great change. As a result, it was noticed that there are both common and distinctive features between these levels. The commonality is due to the universal, universal character of these concepts, the distinctive features in most cases are manifested at the figurative, axiological level. This study contributes to the development of linguofolkloristics, cognitive linguistics. In the future, we will see the practical significance of the study in further study of other genres of Kazakh folk tales as linguistic representations of folk cognition, study of the language of modern author's tales and the need to form a frequency dictionary of the language of folk tales.