Особенности актуализации значений лексем CITY и TOWN в языковом сознании субординативных билингвов

Abstract

Due to the fact that most people today live in cities, the concept CITY is of particular interest to modern scientists. The proposed article is devoted to the study of peculiarities of actualization of the lexemes city and town in the secondary linguistic consciousness of artificial bilinguals. The purpose of the study was to compare the peculiarities of actualization of the lexemes in question in the linguistic consciousness of non-native English speakers, which were identified during a free association experiment with the stimuli city and town, with the data obtained from the analysis of lexicographic sources – explanatory dictionaries of the English language. The study used the method of generalization of lexicographic meanings of the word, free association experiment with stimuli presented in a foreign language (L2), the method of semantic interpretation of association fields, the method of subjective interpretation of the experimental material, and the method of quantitative analysis. In the article, the authors provide generalized lexicographic meanings of the lexemes city and town, identified at the first stage of the study. At the second stage of the study, using the data obtained from the free association experiment, in which undergraduate and graduate students studying English as a foreign language took part, the authors describe the association fields of the lexemes under consideration, give brightness indices of each of the associations and describe the psycholinguistic meaning of each lexeme based on the template description model. In addition, the article presents a detailed analysis of the denotative and connotative macrocomponents of the meaning of the lexemes city and town. There is the data of the third stage of the study provided, which was devoted to the component interpretation of the results of the experiment and to the comparison of the semes included in the generalized dictionary definition of the lexemes city and town and the semes identified during the experiment, besides the peculiarities of actualization of the concept under the study in the secondary linguistic consciousness of non-native English speakers are described.