Motivating Signs of the Student Concept

The article analyzes the dictionary entries “student” presented in the etymological and historical-etymological dictionaries of the Russian language. The purpose of the article is to determine and describe the motivating signs of the student concept according to the methodology of conceptual analysis of the mental formation structure. The article uses methods: conceptual analysis, descriptive and interpretative. The relevance of the stated topic lies in the correlation of the primary signs of the student concept with its conceptual signs. The scientific novelty of the work consists in the first experience of describing the motivating signs of the student concept. Fifteen dictionaries and discourse material of the Russian National Corpus were analyzed. The analysis of the concept revealed 11 motivating signs. The number of motivating signs indicates the great importance of the considering mental formation: the education sector is important for Russian linguoculture. The identified signs are combined into six blocks: 1. Educational process participants (“learner”, “higher school student”, “student”, “skudent”). 2. Affiliation (“student-led”, “student community”). 3. Effort (“work hard”/”endeavor”, “study diligently”, “study thoroughly”). 4. Ambition (“be anxious for success”). 5. Place of studying (“studio”). 6. The process of studying (“study/practice/train”). In the course of the student concept development there was practically no narrowing of the motivating signs, which retained their relevance and became the conceptual signs. There are 10 out 11 motivating signs have been preserved in the modern linguistic picture of the world.