Associative Experiment as an Auxiliary Method to Identify the Features of the Linguocolor Pictures of the Kazakh World

Abstract

Purpose. General aim of this article is the structuring of the functional-semantic field of color terms in the Kazakh language.Results. The article analyzes the experimental results obtained during the psycholinguistic association experiment (AE) conducted in 2021 with students being native Kazakh speakers. The Almaty Corpus of the Kazakh language was used for determining the frequency of basic adjectives in the Kazakh language. There were assigned 8 lexemes as basic color terms in the Kazakh language: қara ‘black’, ақ ‘white’, kok ‘blue’, kyzyl ‘red’, sary ‘yellow’, қоңыр ‘brown’, zhasyl ‘green’ and sur ‘grey’ ‒ on the basis of their frequency, non-derivation, transparency of lexical meaning, wide compatibility with words of different semantic classes and word-formation productivity. The conducted associative experiment was aimed to identify the standards of basic color designations rooted in the linguistic consciousness, as well as the respondents' original reactions to color.Conclusion. The application of the associative experiment revealed the features of the linguistic picture of the world of the Kazakhs in terms of the color representation of reality. The use of AE made it possible to obtain information about different levels of color awareness, which allows clarifying and verifying one of the possible ways to study color designations. A significant proportion of stable associations lie in the emotional, spiritual and intellectual spheres, whereas objects of the environment acting as standards for color values are represented by a large number of single, individual associations.