Reflection of ethnopolitical concepts and scenarios of interethnic relations in the psychological meanings of abstract lexemes

Abstract

Ethnopolitical concepts and scenarios of interethnic relations among representatives of different interacting superethnic systems are reflected in the psychological meanings of words. The semantic structures of the associative fields (AF) of abstract nouns provide relevant, experimentally obtained data representing the psychological realia. The associative-verbal profiles can be regarded as statistical models of the psychological meanings behind the sound bodies of the analyzed lexemes. This study examines the associative fields of two abstract lexemes operating as explicators of dominating ethnopolitical attitudes in the contexts of interethnic relations to trace the semantic aspects of westernization of the young Russian students’ consciousness in the current diachrony (within the last 40–50 years). The analysis covers the latest databases obtained in the Asian regions (Siberia and the Far East) of the Russian Federation: SIBAS 1 (2008–2013) and SIBAS 2 (2014–2021), along with earlier materials: RAS (1988–1997). Psycholinguistic techniques allow us to trace the ways of embedding semantic components of ethnopolitical concepts coming from outside into the image of the world of the Russian language personality. The entries of newly coined or recently borrowed words in the explanatory dictionaries often fail to reflect the emerging lexicosemantic variants of their meanings. Hence, lexicographers can apply the knowledge obtained with the psycholinguistic toolkit as a complementary technique when describing the emerging meanings of recently borrowed words. The psychoglossic and vector analysis of the associative verbal fields allows the researcher to evaluate the dynamics and psychologically relevant trends in their meaning formation.