«Semantic Gestalt» of the concept «Arctic» in the linguistic consciousness of the Russian language’s native speakers

Abstract

This article is devoted to working with dictionaries, namely with an associative dictionary and methods for compiling an associative field according to Yuri Nikolayevich Karaulov (Doctor of Philology, Soviet and Russian linguist, specialist in general and Russian linguistics, lexicology and lexicography, applied linguistics). He believes that in order to study the national and cultural features of the linguistic consciousness of different ethnic groups, it is convenient to use the structure called the «semantic gestalt» of the associative field. Such a structure of the field assumes a natural semantic classification of associates included in the field and is composed of several semantic zones, each of which is a characteristic of some essential feature. Thus, the purpose of the study is a morphological and syntactic analysis of the reactions of the concept «Arctic». The aim of the study is to work on reactions to the stimulus Arctic and parse the word into semantic zones. This article discusses in detail all the meanings and definitions from the explanatory dictionaries of the Russian language, as well as reactions from the Russian associative dictionary. As a result of the study, we revealed a completely different perception of the word «Arctic», which, perhaps, is influenced not only by the social status and age of the interviewed people, but also by their place of residence.