Scholarly record

MAJOR FEATURES OF THE CONCEPT В‘ROAD/WAYВ’ IN THE NOTIONS OF A RUSSIAN AND LATVIAN LINGUISTIC PERSONALITY

Elvira Isajeva, E. Stankeviva, A.Vasiljeva, J. Semeneca

Abstract

The interest of linguistics in studying linguistic personality has significantly grown. This phenomenon is special because, in our opinion, under the conditions of global communication and free access to information, human abilities rapidly expanded and there is an obvious growth of individual evolution. The bearer of linguistic consciousness is a linguistic personality, i.e. human who exists in a language environment – communication, stereotypes of behaviour that are registered in language, meanings of linguistic units and the sense of text. Recently great attention has been paid by researchers to studying linguistic personality. The notion “linguistic personality” as a totality of human abilities and traits that limit text formation and perception was introduced by V. Vinogradov [1] in the 1930s; afterwards it was elaborated as a particular system model by J. Karaulov [2], G. Bogin [3], O. Sirotinyina [4], etc. An extensively used method in psycholinguistic experimental research is that of word direct interpretation, according to which respondents are asked to describe the content of a word and its meaning variants. Method of direct word interpretation entails description of the content and volume of the word meaning. Question “What is X?” appeals to the everyday consciousness of a native speaker of a language. In order to investigate the meaning of psychologically real lexemes road and way in the linguistic consciousness of Russian youths living in Latvia, an experiment was made. It must be noted that the Russian language in Latvia is a language of diaspora that does not perform all functions that the continental Russian language does. The experiment participants were 500 respondents (236 males and 264 females) aged from 18 to 25 whose native language is Russian. Latvian respondents aged from 18 to 25 (500 respondents were polled in Latvian: 219 males and 281 females) were asked to answer the question “What is road?” thus providing the explanation of this word. In the course of the experiment, responses were obtained that justify the notion that, in the linguistic consciousness of Latvian youths (the same as of Russian youths living in Latvia), not all meanings are present but only those that correspond to the individual social experience of getting to know the world. During the experiment, its participants were asked not only to give definitions of the lexemes road and way but also synonyms for these words.

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