Motivational and Active Salience in Ethnopsycholinguistic Studies of Values

Abstract

The article is devoted to the problem of the role of speech activity in the formation and transformation of culture. To solve this problem, the author substantiates the need to determine the principles of functioning of speech activity as a social phenomenon. Based on a comparison of the conceptual provisions of activity theories, psychological and sociological, the author determines the specificity of speech activity as social (self-regulatory); compares the principles of studying the “life-world” in sociology and the “image of the world” in psychology as the implementation of a “life program”; defines the basic principles of ethnopsycholinguistic research of the “image of the world” as a regulating mechanism of human and society activity; argues for the introduction of the category of motivational and active salience into the ethnopsycholinguistic study of values. Understanding the “image of the world” as a situation of correlating activity with reality allows us to determine the principles of organization and functioning of speech activity as social or self-regulatory. Based on the role of speech activity in the formation and functioning of the “image of the world,” interdisciplinary problems of the essence and conditions for the formation of personality and society are solved. To do this, it is proposed to introduce the category of motivational and functional significance, established on the basis of the data of an associative experiment, into the modeling of the structure and content of the actual psychological meaning (meaning) of values as an attitude towards action in a certain direction. A special role is given to the interpretation of emotional speech actions, considered as a manifestation of attitude to the conditions of activity; as well as the “effective” component, the content of which is associated with understanding the situation from the point of view of methods (operations) of action. The fundamentally interdisciplinary nature of the object of study - speech action as a social one - makes it possible to use the proposed model in the study of various aspects of cognition (psychological, sociological, cultural, political science, etc.) and thereby offers a verbal methodology for studying interdisciplinary problems of cognition.