Peculiarities of Greek Origin Words Perception by the Representatives of Contemporary Russian Linguistic Culture: Associative Experiment

The article describes the associative experiment as one of the most productive methods of modern psycholinguistics. The theoretical works of Russian and foreign researchers on the theory and practice of the associative experiment in modern linguistics are reviewed. To illustrate the associative experiment, the analysis of the associative fields, formed by the reactions of the Russian-speaking respondents to the words of Greek origin is presented. The relevance of the work is determined by the fact that the authors make an attempt to study the peculiarities of the perception of borrowed words, using the mechanisms of perception of these or those concepts by native speakers, their evaluation and connotations. This seems interesting not only for contemporary psycholinguistics, but also for semantics, stylistics, cognitive linguistics and other branches of linguistics. The linguocultural value of the study lies in the fact that the experiment allows determine how a word of foreign origin, occurring in Russian, retains the charge of the original culture from which it came. The linguistic material for the study is the most common or typical Greek expressions from the poems of A.S. Khomyakov, a Russian poet of the 19th century, one of the founders of the Slavophile movement. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that the language of A.S. Khomyakov’s works is still understudied. The study of the Greekisms as a foreign cultural phenomenon in the texts of a Slavophile poet, whose philosophical concept is connected with "traditionalism" both in the understanding of culture and language, is of scientific interest. We describe the associative fields to the words-stimuli prophet and ether , using Y.N. Karaulov's methodology, which implies the consideration of associations from lexico-syntactic, morphological, cognitive, pragmatic and statistical points of view. From the linguocultural point of view it is important to identify the cognitive features of the perception of the stimuli. The experiment helped to discover that words of Greek origin continue to carry a charge of Greek culture, in addition, they have become an integral part of Russian culture, manifesting themselves in the minds of native speakers through association with Russian precedent texts. The analysis of associative fields made it possible to reveal the peculiarities of the perception of words of Greek origin by native speakers of modern Russian, and to compare the obtained meanings with those that the words had when they were written in the 19th century. The transformation of semantics, as well as the re-accumulation from one meaning to another, the emergence of new meanings, which corresponds to the historical development of words, are noted.