Concepts of “Counsel” and “Prosecutor” as Perceived by Native Russian Speakers

Abstract

The relevance of the article is determined by the deep interest of contemporary linguistics in studying language units from an anthropological perspective. Psycholinguistics, being one of such study areas, provides some tools to reveal the process of modern humans thinking and following some thought patterns. We assume that the judicial employees' professional worldview, shaped by a specific field of judiciary, and ordinary consciousness, formed under the influence of everyday life, reflects various linguistic world pictures of Russian speakers, which manifest through the images created while perceiving the same language units. Thus, the psycholinguistic method of free association seems to be the most relevant technique that makes it possible to study how the lexemes counsel and prosecutor find their expression in the linguistic consciousness of native Russian speakers. The article highlights the results of free association that represent the peculiarities of associative perception in professional, judicial and ordinary consciousness for the concepts mentioned above. The participants of the experiment were persons both with a law degree and not. The results of the experiment have shown that the lawyers professional worldview, when digesting the concepts proposed, shifts the focus to the subject area, in the images of a counsel and a prosecutor a lawyer sees their professional activity and competence. For ordinary consciousness, however, these images are connected to respondents' expectations and emotional attitude towards them, which enables to assess the connotations of these lexemes, being formed by ordinary consciousness.