Этноязыковая специфика оценочных вербальных ассоциаций на стимулы-части тела

Abstract

The article covers upon verbal-ethnic peculiarities of neutral reactions and ones with assessment (positive and negative) to stimuli head, hand, foot in Russian, Belarusian and American associative dictionaries. It deals with qualitative and quantitative analyses of associations-assessments and their further classification as the method of defining them. It is based on psycholinguistic research foundation of valuable reflection of different objective relations and investigates objective and verbal semantic links between words in the associative-verbal network of an average language speaker. While defining associative links of assessment, the author looks upon reactions as the words that may contain general assessment in their denotative meaning. A binomial stimulus → reaction is also considered as either a free or set word expression with possible connotative assessment. Assessment can be implied out of the direct meaning of the actualized expression or its figurative meaning. It is concluded that frequent phraseological associative links in the associative-verbal network of an average language speaker predetermine one’s evaluative attitudes to the objects and contribute to evaluative components of meaning of the corresponding words. The so-called precedential associations can refer not only to idioms of a language, but also to names, titles, texts, objects and notions of a cultural group. Different salience of the categories in the three languages indicates some deductions about the specific properties of the linguistic world image of Russians, Belarusians and Americans, and of their verbal thinking.