Experimental Study of Lexical Choice Situation (on the Material of the Constructions otkryvat’ butylku ‘open a bottle’ and otkuporivat’ butylku ‘uncork a bottle’)

Lexical competition between lexical units and extralinguistic factors influencing lexical choice have remained one of the fundamental problems within the scope of the onomasiological approach to lexical semantics as of yet. In previous studies of one of the authors, such competition was explored with an example of the constructions otkryvat’ butylku ‘open a bottle’ and otkuporivat’ butylku ‘uncork a bottle’. The experimental study reported in this article provides some evidence in favor of the results obtained in the previous research based on a corpus analysis. In this study, the participants filled the most appropriate, in their opinion, words in the gaps in the sentences taken from the Russian National Corpus, which previously contained the verb otkuporivat’ ‘uncork’. The results of the study confirmed earlier observations that the verb otkuporivat’ correlates with the “literary” context of use and the verb otkryvat’ with the “everyday” context. In addition, the results of the experiments pave the way for the correlation between the construction otkryvat’ butylku and the action of a “fast” cognitive system that activates surface connections between lexical units, and the correlation between the construction otkuporivat’ butylku and the action of a “slow” system that creates a mental representation of the situation designated in the sentence.