The study of correlation between Chinese tone and the character of lexical emotivity
The purpose of this study is to determine the level of interdependency between the nature of tone in Chinese language and the features of manifestation of a lexical unit`s emotional component. The study used the following psycholinguistic techniques: directed associative experiment with Russian speakers, experiment for emotive component identification in the lexemes, the study of Chinese tones emotional component among native speakers of Chinese. The experiments with lexemes of native language caused maximal difficulties for speakers of both languages. We guess it relates to the fact that the respondents` choice of lexical units, naming emotions and generated by the speaker`s consciousness during listening toned syllable, was quite wide, due to the synonymy. When recoding a concrete word containing emotional component to the name of the emotion the respondents were required to do it pointwise, so the area of possible choices was narrowed. For Chinese speakers the experiment for emotive component identification in the lexemes didn`t cause any difficulties, while tone identification in pseudowords was difficult. Thus, manifesting differently in the Chinese and Russian samples, the correlation between tones and the character of lexical emotivity was fixed.