The semantic content of the concept of CALMNESS in the minds of native speakers of the Russian language

The object of the research is the concept of CALMNESS in the national consciousness. The object of research is the dynamics of this concept, because under the influence of economic, political processes, and changes in society as a whole, the content of the concept also change. The subject of the study is the lexical means of objectification of the concept of CALMNESS in the Russian language, presented in lexicographic sources, and the means of its speech representation, presented by the materials of a chain associative experiment conducted in 2023, in which 130 native speakers of the Russian language aged 18 to 80 years took part. The object and subject of the study determine its purpose – to describe the semantic content of the concept of CALMNESS in the minds of native speakers of the Russian language based on data from dictionaries and psycholinguistic experiment. The work uses linguistic methods of definitional and component analysis, the field method, and the method of conceptual analysis. The results of the study: during the interpretation of the results of the analysis of dictionary data, eight cognitive features of the concept of CALMNESS (CF1 – CF8) were identified, all of them were verified when processing the results of an associative experiment, i.e. they are relevant to the consciousness of modern native speakers. The research materials can be used in the development of manuals on Russian as a foreign language, the lexicology of the main language, as well as in the creation of associative dictionaries. The analysis of the experimental results showed that in the content of the concept it is also possible to identify such new cognitive features as ‘the state in which a person is at home / with his family’ (CF9) and ‘the cessation of being, existence’ (CF10). It should be noted that the linguistic objectification of the CF10-feature was found in etymological dictionaries, however, modern explanatory dictionaries do not record the corresponding meaning of the key lexeme. Despite this, this cognitive feature is still present in the minds of some native speakers of modern Russian.

cognitive linguistics, concept, content of the concept, cognitive feature, field model, psycholinguistic experiment, the key lexeme, associative field, psycholinguistic meaning, Russian language