Dynamics of the Image of War in the Russian Language Consciousness (Psycholinguistic Aspect)

Abstract
The article is devoted to the psycholinguistic analysis of changes the image of war has been undergoing in the Russian language consciousness. The research of the word war on the basis of psycholinguistic associative experiments can open access to the understanding of meanings given to the word by typical native speakers, as well as to the understanding of images that arise in their linguistic consciousness. A comparative analysis of the Russian associative bases obtained in different years made it possible to reveal the dynamics of connections formed by the word war at the macro level (in the core of linguistic consciousness) and at the micro level (in the associative field including reactions to the word-stimulus war). Comparison of the data of Russian and European (British, American, French and Spanish) associative bases exposed the common and the Russian-only of the semantic structure of the image of war in linguistic consciousness of nations under analysis. An associative experiment made with Russian military servicemen helped reveal professional features of the associations evoked by the word war, primarily, a higher degree of relevance of the concept war evidenced by a great number of associative connections. In all associative bases under analysis, the most frequent reactions caused by the stimulus war are the words peace and death. However, the European associative bases demonstrate stability of the high frequency of reaction peace in the course of years, while in the Russian linguistic consciousness the war – death association has become more frequent in the last forty years. This phenomenon may be related to the variability of the meaningfulness of the both members of the universal dichotomy war – peace, as evidenced by the results of their etymological analysis undertaken in this research. The word peace in various languages originally meant “harmony, integrity”, than “the absence of war”. This original meaning seems to be more correlated to the primary meaning of the concept of war in Romance and Germanic (“confusion”), than to the historic denotation of the term to “hunting, stalking” in Slavic and Baltic languages. The results of the psycholinguistic analysis do not reveal any signs of heightened militarism in the Russian mass consciousness. The war is perceived by native Russian speakers as a negative phenomenon, which instills confidence in the predominance of peace-loving traits in the Russian national character.

Keywords
war, peace, language consciousness, structure of the associative field, universal and professionally specific, Russian associative databases and dictionaries