Theoretical and methodological background to experimental research on semantics of proper names and linguistic consciousness

Abstract

The article is concerned with new linguistics trends associated with turning scientists’ attention from the study of language being a system autonomous from a person to the study of language being a phenomenon of human consciousness. The anthropocentric paradigm is premised on the idea that, as Baudouin de Courtenay noted «language exists only in individual brains, only in souls, only in the psyche of individuals». The anthropocentric paradigm is one of the leading ones in modern world linguistics. In different countries, there are numerous scientific schools basing on the anthropocentric paradigm. In the Russian Federation, one of the leading schools in this field is the Voronezh Scientific Theoretical and Linguistic School of General and Russian Linguistics, whose members have made a significant contribution to the development of psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, and linguoculturology. The article describes the theoretical and methodological foundations of experimental studies on linguistic consciousness based on the example of a project on creating a new differential empirical model for describing the meanings of proper names as phenomena of linguistic consciousness. The article also describes the concept of linguistic consciousness (the central object of linguistic research in Russia), options for its modeling (construction of simple and complex models of linguistic consciousness) and experimental methods for its study. It is stated that a simple model of linguistic consciousness is an associative field, and a complex model of linguistic consciousness has a psycholinguistic meaning. The article specifies the algorithm for their description.