Towards the explication of the universals of the Russian language personality on the model of the associative-verbal network

Abstract

The study of the universals of the Russian language personality on the model of the associative-verbal network (AVN) proceeds from ontological and epistemological aspects. Ontologically the AVN “inherits” a number of functional properties from the human cognitome hypernetwork. Along with the dissipation of grammar and stochastic formation of the vectors of associative dominants, they can be attributed to universals in the narrow sense of the word (ultimately due to the evolutionary biological specifics of the species). On the one hand, the dissipated character of grammar in the AVN and stochasticity of the emergence of meaningful vectors impose epistemological restrictions on the methods used to study the AVN phenomena. On the other hand, the gradual accumulation of the new Russian corpora of verbal associations opens a window of research perspectives for studying culturally imposed universals of the Russian language personality in current diachrony with reference to ethno-social and regional variability. The formalization of associative-verbal processes is associated with methods of explicating grammar (dissipated in AVN) and its role in the emergent meaning-formation. The author’s techniques of working with the AVN of the Russian language personality on the latest experimental materials (the database SIBAS and its subcorpora) are aimed at explicating the associative profiles of lexico-grammatical phenomena and their relevance for the analysis of the universals in a broad sense of the term, the associative dominants creating a unified but dynamic with their fluctuations semantic field of the personality’s verbal culture.