ANALYSIS OF THE ASSOCIATIVE FIELD STRUCTURE OF COLOUR (BASED ON UDMURT AND RUSSIAN LANGUAGES)

The relevance of the undertaken research lies in the fact that the system of colour terms in any language and culture is a significant part of the language picture of the world. The semantics of colour may vary depending on the processes occurring in society and the historical-cultural context. The methodological principle in psycholinguistic experimental research is the principle of the study of colour names semantics in the so-called «mode of use». Studying the associative fields derived from stimuli – colour names, we make an attempt to reconstruct a colour picture image in the minds of native speakers of a language. The colour names and associations which they cause differ across cultures. The colour names in the Udmurt language served as the main material. The basic principle of the analysis was the grouping of associations according to the similarity for their relationship with the word-stimulus to establish the structure of associative fields, and identify the associative potential of the original word. The quantitative parameters included the level of stereotyped reactions; a number of different and individual reactions to the stimulus word; the differences in the degrees of relevance of different lexical-semantic variants. Comparative studies based on the association experiments allow identifying the similarities and differences in associative behaviour of recipients and the specific content of colour terms for the representatives of different cultures. The research revealed that besides direct colour nomination, colour names may have figurative meaning or lexical-semantic variant previously unrecorded in the dictionaries.