Understanding Consubstantial Linguistic Terms by Russian Native Speakers

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to look at how Russian native speakers understand consubstantial linguistic terms. An experimental study was conducted with the participation of 54 respondents engaged in different fields of activities and with different educational backgrounds. All the respondents are Russian native speakers. The questionnaire designed for the experiment contained questions that tested the respondents’ understanding of 13 consubstantial terms. The study shows both similarities and differences in the respondents’ understanding of them. Respondents related to different fields of activities and education have a similar potential for understanding the everyday meaning of the terms. Knowledge in linguistics predictably leads to much better understanding and distinction of the linguistic meanings of the terms. Semantic relations between linguistic and everyday meanings significantly affect the identification of linguistic meanings, in particular, the relations of inclusion, overlapping, coincidence of linguistic and everyday meanings have a positive effect on understanding. Russian speakers use different approaches to interpret the terms (semantic, syntactic and pragmatic approaches). The experiment makes it possible to outline the directions for optimizing the procedure of examining recognition of term phrases by the native speakers in subsequent experiments. In the future, further development of this study can be a theoretical and practical basis for creating a dictionary of consubstantial linguistic terms and a system for their automatic identification, which is relevant to several tasks in the field of automatic text processing.