ASSOCIATIVE POTENTIAL OF ENGLISH HIPPONYMS

Abstract

Introduction. The study highlights the need for more research concerning the hipponymic subframe of modern English, as a set of proper names of Thoroughbred horses that are actively involved in sports competitions, as well as proper names of hobby horses which serve as pets. We investigate the forms of existence and structure of the associative field of English hipponyms in the mental lexicon of native English speakers through a free associative experiment, which serves as the best method foridentifying the semantic content of hipponymic concepts.The purpose of the article is the analysis of hipponyms in the mental lexicon, i.e. in the mind of an individual and not in language or speech. The object of the study is the real-official, real non-official and virtual horse names of the English language. The subject is English hipponyms as phenomena of mental lexicon.Materials and methods. The descriptive method and the method of analysis are used in course of the research. A free onomastic associative experiment was held, based on the interview of 250 Englishspeakingrespondents who were offered 6 hipponymic stimuli, and the results were interpreted. In accordance with the results of the survey 1480 associative reactions were received.Results. On the basis of the data obtained the peculiarities of horse name representation in the mental lexicon of native English speakers were studied.Сonclusions. The findings of the present experiment helped to establish the structure of the associative field of real official, real non-official and virtual horse names and their place in the English world picture. The results point to an interesting trend. The dominant types of reactions on hipponym-stimuli are hyperonymic and synonymic, which is determined by the nature of human thinking, which primarily tries to assign onym to a certain class or to give it individual characteristics. Most of the participants of our experiment provided the reactions of recognition and identified the hipponyms of the real official and virtual sectors, which indicates high popularity of these names among native English speakers. Only few respondents identified popular real non-official hipponym-stimuli as horsenames.