Experimental psycholinguistic study of imagery (based on the lexical units with motivating culinary semantics)
The article discusses the problem of awareness of lexical figurativeness by native speakers based on the data of free and directed psycholinguistic experiments. It identifies how awareness of word figurativeness is reflected in lexical and metatextual reactions to figurative stimulus words. The stimuli are represented by figurative words (lexemes with inner metaphorical form) motivated by names of gastronomic phenomena. The techniques of free and directed experiments were applied to identify the awareness of lexical figurativeness. The data obtained were specified through oral questioning of native speakers. The experiment showed lexical (figurative and non-figurative words and word combinations) as well as metatextual reactions - contexts, more or less extended statements explicating metalinguistic reflection. The analysis of linguistic data allows determination of various factors that influence the degree of brightness/triteness of lexical imagery, which in its turn gives an opportunity to specify the criteria for identifying figurative vocabulary, its relevant characteristics, composition, scope and limits. The experiment resulted in a body of metatexts that allows analyzing the semantics of figurative units to specify how native speakers cognize the correlation between denotative and associative figurative meanings. The reaction of the informants indicates that the model figurative representations embodied in the semantics of the word are persistent stereotypes of linguistic consciousness that determine a mechanism of association - paradigmatic metaphorical associations. The article describes various groups of lexical and metatextual reactions to the word-stimuli that differ in mechanisms of figurative association. The directed experiment has revealed the cases with varying conceptual and figurative semantics of the word in everyday interpretations by native speakers. It has also shown the cases of actualized and neutralized figurativeness. The linguistic consciousness of native speakers suggests that the awareness of figurativeness is influenced by such parameters as clarity, ambiguity or paradoxical inner form of the word. It shows that figurativeness interacts with other properties of the word, such as motivation, metaphoricity, emotiveness, evaluation, intensity, and expressiveness. The data of free and directed psycholinguistic experiments confirm the fact that the language has fixed figurative representations embodied on the lexical-semantic level in the content of figurative words, the two-plane meanings of which are cognized by speakers depending on the terms of communication.