The Peculiarities of the Perception and Understanding of Sonnets Written by W. Shakespeare by the Students of the Faculty of Foreign Languages

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to analyze the peculiarities of the perception and understanding of Sonnets written by W. Shakespeare by the students of the Faculty of Foreign Languages. The methods of the research are: in order to study the features of perception and understanding of the absurd in the sonnets of W. Shakespeare we used the method of associative experiment. In our research we examined the dependence of the latent period of awareness of the absurd meaning of speech acts, depending on the nature of stimulation. For comparing we proposed to students high-frequency phrases, emotionally colored ones (chosen from the sonnets of W. Shakespeare), low-frequency statements, stylistically colored phrases, statements which include slang. The results of the research. At the end of the procedure of the experiment, a total of 1958 verbal responses of the students were received. From them, 897 reactions are for high frequency phrases; 458 – for emotionally colored ones; 293 are for low frequency phrases; 256 – for stylistically colored ones and only 54 reactions are for slang. At the stage of the analysis of the results we arranged the groups of words depending on statistical differences in the average time of the associative reaction for each group in order from the smallest one to the largest group: 1) high-frequency and emotionally colored; 2) stylistically colored: 3) low-frequency; 4) phrases with slang. Conclusions. It was proved that students adequately perceived and understood the emotionally colored phrases that were selected by us from W. Shakespeare’s sonnets and contained explicit and implicit absurd meaning. This gives us reason to argue that these statements, with their expressive context and absurd content, in a great degree attracted students that they perceived these phrases as personally significant, experienced them in such a way that they already entered their sphere of personally significant experience.