Article

Name: Ontologemes of the Russian Language personality in the movement of associative dominants

Authors: Irina V. Shaposhnikova

Institute of Philology of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation

In the section Linguistics

Abstract:

This paper examines a set of associative units that name people and function as ontological, system-forming dominants of the Russian linguistic personality. The study focuses on the diachronic shifts within the “I (me)–family–children” ontologeme, as well as the deictic units and kinship terms that mark role functions within the family. The comparative analysis is based on data from two major reverse associative dictionaries: the Russian Associative Dictionary (RAS, 1988–1997) and the Siberian Associative Dictionary (SIBAS 1+2, 2008–2022). By ranking associative dominants according to their number of incoming links and conducting functional tests on associative fields, the author identifies the intensity and direction of shifts in the mental lexicon. The material, collected through long-term associative experiments among students, reflects the dynamics of socio-communicative attitudes among Russian youth, from the Perestroika era to the early 2020s. The author employs chronoglossation to visualize the increasing or decreasing semantic weight of these dominants. These linguistic vectors are interpreted within the broader context of sociogenesis and compared with contemporary sociological data. Ultimately, the research highlights how the linguistic personality adapts its core ontological nodes in response to the profound sociocultural transformations of the last three decades, providing a map of the evolving Russian world-image.

Keywords: Russian language personality, ontologemes, personal deixis, kinship terms, mental lexicon, associative dominants

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