COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE ASSOCIATIVE FIELDS OF THE WORDS “KORKA” AND “YORT” (BASED ON THE MATERIAL OF THE UDMURT AND TATAR LANGUAGES)

The paper presents the results of an interlanguage study of the semantics of the word “house” in the minds of speakers of the Udmurt and Tatar languages. In psycholinguistics the associative field (AF) of a word is treated as a verbal model and a tool of accessing the content and structure of the word meaning, which is regarded as a communicatively relevant part of the concept. It is important to note that the meaning of its semes conveys the cognitive features and components that form the concept, but this is always only part of the semantic content of the concept. The novelty of studying the semantics of a word in this perspective is determined by the fact that such comparative studies with native speakers of the Udmurt and Tatar languages have not been conducted before. The aim of the work is to identify universal and national-specific features in the content of the associative field of the Udmurt lexeme KORKA and the Tatar lexeme YORT. The features of the semantic structure of the correlative words in the studied languages are revealed. The study showed that the real meaning of the word in the minds of people is much broader, more voluminous and more diverse than the meaning presented in dictionaries, and it includes both emotional and evaluative characteristics and vital values of peoples. The purpose of the article is to demonstrate the practical possibilities of using one of the effective ways to study the semantics of a word by its associative field and to show how this approach can be used in interlanguage research. The main method of research is an associative experiment, as a result of which the researcher receives a set of verbal reactions that form the associative field of the word. In the course of working with the AF, the method of comparative semantic analysis and the method of analysing dictionary definitions were used. The article analyses associative fields, identifies quantitative and qualitative parameters of the content of the AF of the studied stimuli, defines the main ways of identifying the meaning of the word by the participants of the experiment. Quantitative analysis of the material revealed that native speakers of the Udmurt language are distinguished by a high level of stereotypical responses, the presence of reactions in the Russian language. The AF received from native Tatar speakers is much broader due to the wide variety of individual reactions. Both groups recognised the proposed stimulus mainly through paradigmatic type reactions. The main ways of identifying the word turned out to be universal and manifested through reliance on a mental image or representation and emotional-evaluative connections with the stimulus word.