Narrowing the Gap between Linguistic Education and Life Experience
This article discusses problematic aspects of systematization of relatively new knowledge about human language and language faculty, obtained mostly in some interdisciplinary domains due to the IT revolution of the second half of the XXth century. The author presents a new Russian regional database of free associations (2008 - 2013) which has been made in collaboration of psycholinguists with University educators in Asian regions of Russia. The project aimed at widening the basis of evidence for interdisciplinary (psycho- and ethnolinguistic) research on the Russian associative-verbal data. It enables us to judge about stability and changeability of the Russian associative dominants with reference to reflecting the value systems of young Russians. Moreover, the associative-verbal net provides linguists with materials for effective description of the modern Russian active grammar. The article focuses on the potential of associative lexicography in identifying units of analysis for scientific research and corresponding linguo-didactic units for educationalists who practice language teaching. The idea of “parsing” associative databases and their connection with text corpora is proposed for discussion. The possibility of making up associative profiles of the already discovered (within the limits of traditional linguistic techniques) lexicographic types of lexemes is viewed as a first step of the “parsing” procedure.