Estimating Similarity of Words in the Language Consciousness of Speakers of Different Variants of French (France, Belgium, Canada, Switzerland)

Abstract

This article considers a method that helps to evaluate the level of similarity of a word in the language consciousness of the French language speakers from four different francophone regions (France, Belgium, Switzerland, Canada). To il lustrate the approach the word vie (life) has been chosen as it belongs to the nucleus of the language consciousness of French speakers, according to the results of the associative experiment that was made in 2008 and 2009 via Internet with the aid of google-questionnaires. To assess similarity in understanding the word vie (life) by French speakers from the chosen regions we use the semantic closeness index finding formula proposed by D. Yu. Prosovetsky. Originally the formula was applied to the calculation of the semantic closeness of two different words. In this research the formula has been adapted to the analysis of one word-stimulus presented in the associative fields of the regions considered. To apply this formula one needs first to count the number of similar words that appear in associative fields of the chosen word pairwise. Six pairs are addressed (France-Belgium, France-Canada, France-Switzerland, Belgium-Canada, Belgium-Switzerland, Canada-Switzerland). After that, the doubled number of similar words in one pair of countries is divided by the sum of the total number of reactions of the two given fields. The calculations conducted in this article pairwise for the word vie (life) present the following numbers of the index of semantic closeness: pairs Belgium-Switzerland, Switzerland-Canada, France-Switzerland 0,09 each; the highest index belongs to the pairs of France-Canada and Belgium-Canada 0,12 each; the pair France-Belgium occupies the intermediary position with the result of 0,1. The calculations illustrate that the associative fields of the word vie in the four considered regions (France, Belgium, Switzerland, Canada) include similar elements, however, the exact agreement is not observed.

Keywords

associative experiment, language consciousness, the French language