Dostoevsky Omsk State University, Russia, Omsk, larisabut@rambler.ru
The paper considers how the city and the urban environment are conceptualized in the linguistic consciousness of its residents. This is identified through a free association experiment with the participants of school age, the elderly, students, and further semantic analysis of the obtained associative fields, as well as schoolchildrenʼs essays about their hometown. The research object is the consciousness of an individual as a system of complex dynamic semantic connections that form the subjective semantics of language signs. The research subject involves the structures of individualsʼ consciousness associated with city as a word stimulus as psycholinguistic phenomena. The paper aims to demonstrate how semantic fields reflecting the ideas about the city of the residents of different age are formed. The findings of the study include the specifics of the interpretation of the city as a spatial phenomenon by the residents of different age through the choice of the principles of categorization and conceptualization of the “background-figure” type, mediated by the regional discursive environment. Given this, the city as a kind of psycho-mental construct is embedded in the dimensional, social, quantitative and perceptual categories. In the process of verbalizing the semantic areas associated with the stimulus these categories turn out to be more important than the discursive influence. The influence of discourses is present in the form of an “echo” both in associations and in the texts of essays.
linguistic consciousness; conceptualization; categorization; association experiment; subjective semantics; semantic area
Download textFor citing: Butakova L.O. (2023). City as a psycholinguistic phenomenon: regional aspect. Ethnopsycholinguistics. Moscow: INION RAN. Vol. 3(14), pp. 7-31. DOI: 10.31249/epl/2023.03.01