Modeling of the Associative Field Россия/Russia According to Associative Dictionaries

Abstract

Modeling associative fields is one of the urgent missions of psycholinguistics. This contributes to establishing the nature of the speech actions, which reflect psychological, linguistic, ethnoand socio-cultural information. In this paper, the associates for the verbal stimuli Россия and Russia, presented in the associative dictionaries of the Russian and English languages, are analyzed. Analysis of the nature of the means of prediction allowed us to establish the predominance of conceptual reactions in the structure of the associative fields Россия and Russia: in Russian associative dictionaries their share is about 40%, in the Edinburgh associative thesaurus it is 51%, in the dictionary of free associations, rhyme and word fragment norms of South Florida – 53%. Reactions-representations contain extralinguistic information reflecting autoand heterostereotypes about Russia in a certain historical period of time. The largest share of associated representations was found in the Edinburgh Associative Thesaurus (39%). Most reactions of this type are associated with the successes of the USSR in the space sphere directly during the period of collecting and fixing associative data (sputnik, satellite, cosmos, space, space program, etc.). The presentation reactions of American subjects are less frequent (37%). For Americans, Russia is something far away and foreign. Also, in the experiment with the participation of Americans, the connections of the incentive Russia with the Second World War and its consequences (Berlin wall, Nazi, Hitler, cold war) were actualized. Reactions-representations in associative dictionaries of the Russian language reflect autostereotypes: strength and greatness (великая, сила, мощь), spaciousness (большая, простор, громада, размах)), etc. The share of operational reactions in Russian associative dictionaries decreased by 14%, which indicates the leveling of language guidelines when updating speech action. The models of associative fields of Russia contain a low percentage of operational reactions, which indicates an insufficient level of "appropriation" of a fragment of reality represented by a stimulus word.