COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE ASSOCIATIVE FIELDS СОВЕСТЬ – CONSCIENCE

Author(s):  N.I. Stepykin, candidate of Sciences, associate Professor, Southwest State University, Kursk, Russia, nick1086@mail.ru

Issue:  Volume 38, № 2

Rubric:  Linguistics

Annotation:  The paper focuses on the research of associative field conscience in Russian and American linguistic cultures. As a result of the comparative analysis of the free associative experiment data, the following common components for Russians and Americans were identified: moral, shame, guilt, act, correctness, morality, responsibility, truth, honor, remorse. However, the hierarchy of these associates in the structure of the studied associative fields is different. The analysis of the most frequent reactions of Russian respondents allowed to conclude that conscience is a morality, a system of norms and values that regulates people's relations. Honesty and decency are the main values and manifestations of conscience. Lie is anti-value, which can make a person experience feelings of guilt and shame (4 and 5 responses respectively). From American point of view, conscience is a sense of guilt and shame, controlled by mind and associated with ethical categories of honor and truth. 24 % of syntactic reactions were found among the responses of Americans. Most associations represent N-Adj combinations with functional-semantic feature of quality (18 %). Associative field совесть includes 11 % of syntactic reactions. The author of the article extracted extralinguistic information reflected in the following reactions: Gimini Cricket, 12 angry men, Thoreau. Thus, the structure and content of the associative field good in the Russian and American linguistic cultures revealed common features due to the universality of ethical concepts. The differences were manifested in the combination of linguistic and extralinguistic factors, in the nature of the mechanisms of the stimulus-response link, in different hierarchy and dynamics of the constituting components.

Keywords:  associative field, comparative analysis, speech act, conscience, linguistic culture

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