Associative Dictionaries as an Ethnic Mental Phenomenon: Basic Values in the Core of Ethnic Group Language Consciousness

Abstract

Introduction. Associative research is widely practiced in the field of sciences related to linguistics as an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the relationship of language with consciousness, psyche, and human culture; the corpus of associative data we have created in the Kazakh language replenishes associative lexicography in the context of broad intercultural comparisons. Materials and methods. The dictionaries of the associative norms of the Kazakh language (Dmitryuk, 1978; Dmitryuk, Moldalieva et al., 2014), prepared on the basis of data of free associative experiments (SAE) with 1000 Kazakh students, contain unique information about the mentality and ethnocultural characteristics of the Kazakh ethnic group in the Soviet and modern period. FAE is a well-known method of employing the associative experiment data, the reliable way to access a person’s linguistic consciousness; statistical processing of the FAE body associative data provided for the analytical comparison of a hierarchical sequence of the Kazakh basic values as a linguistic consciousness core – its central and peripheral zones – in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. Results. Due to the diachronic and interethnic comparative analysis: such basic Kazakh values as religion beliefs, freedom, sovereignty, state symbols have been subjected to the significant changes; ethnic cultural kernel preferences remained traditionally unchanged, constituting the specific essence of the ethnic national mentality: attitude to motherland, mother, elders, men, gender and age as specific peculiarities in the hierarchy of family relations. Conclusions. The intralingua comparison of the dictionaries’ contents revealed a very stable body of unchanging value priorities, indicating a fairly strong core and a significant vitality degree of Kazakh society. The work contributes to the intercultural associative research, associative lexicography and provides for the development of promising research in Psycholinguistics in Kazakhstan.