On the Question of Experimental Description Semantics of Language Units
The article discusses the levels of description of the meaning of a word, among which a psycholinguistic description is singled out, made on the basis of the results of psycholinguistic experiments. The author points out the merits and advantages of the experimental technique, dwelling on the essential points of its application. The psycholinguistic meaning of a word is described as a set of semantic components identified through special processing of experimental results, which are the reactions of native speakers to stimulus words as a reflection of their linguistic consciousness. On specific examples, the article shows the methods of sememе and seme interpretation of the linguistic material obtained in the course of psycholinguistic experiments. The possibilities of this technique are considered and theoretically substantiated when fixing the connotative macro-component of the meaning. The necessity of a comprehensive integrated approach to the description of the semantics of a word, including a generalized lexicographic description, the results of contextual analysis and psycholinguistic experiments, is emphasized. In this case, much attention should be paid to the field approach to the semantic structure of word meanings, since in traditional explanatory dictionaries the arrangement of word meanings does not always correspond to the semantic core-periphery principle. Accounting for quantitative indicators that mark the brightness and, accordingly, a high level of communicative relevance of the associative reactions of the participants in the experiments, is essential for the implementation of the field structuring of semantemes and sememes. The article notes the invaluable contribution of the scientific and theoretical school of Voronezh State University in the field of general and Russian linguistics and personally I.A. Sternin in the development of the theoretical foundations of the psycholinguistic description of the meaning of the word. This direction has been applied in the form of a whole series of “Psycholinguistic explanatory dictionaries of the Russian language” published under the editorship and with the direct participation of the well-known linguist, which contributes to the further progress of psycholinguistic lexicography.