The Concept of Happiness in the Linguistic Consciousness of Native Russian Speakers: Psycholinguistic Aspect

Abstract

The comprehensive description of the Russian language consciousness fragment, which is associated with the feeling of happiness, is introduced in conformity with the psycholinguistic approach to the analysis of linguistic facts. The article describes the associative field of the happiness lexeme in the Russian language. Some culturally rich cognitive features that form the content of the happiness as the feeling in the Russian linguistic consciousness have been identified with consideration of associative dictionaries. The analysis has resulted in determining some basic cognitive categories in the Russian language consciousness: emotion and feeling, belonging, object, evaluation, being, volume, space, time, state, action, characteristic, quality, expression, subject-person, reason, light, distance, goal, animals, desire, weight, color, place, food, value, attitude, degree, plant, others. The metaphorical models of the Happiness concept realization have been observed: happiness is a living being; happiness is light; happiness is a place to be; happiness is food; happiness is an object. They are characteristic and significant for the mentality of the Russian language native speakers. The algorithm suggested for the linguistic analysis of Happiness concept may be applied to the description of other emotive concepts. All the results obtained during the analysis, are relevant for the development of psycholinguistics and emotive linguistics.