Science names in the language consciousness of Russian and Chinese students

Abstract

The article discusses the results of the associative experiment aimed at the comparative analysis of some science names in the language consciousness of Russian and Chinese students. These three areas are united around the names of the days of the week, the names of professions and the names of scientific disciplines. Language consciousness is defined as a concept fixing the relationship between changes in meanings and personal senses of words, on the one hand, and external (social) and internal (mental) factors of language functioning, on the other hand. The experiment involved 104 Russian and 100 Chinese students. The analysis of the material was based on the authors’ method of semantic-thematic grouping of associations with their subsequent analysis. As the analysis and comparison of the reactions of Chinese and Russian students to the same stimuli complexes showed, all of them are influenced by both internal and external factors. Images of the language consciousness are formed under the influence of socio-cultural factors (school curriculum and educational system in general) and emotional-personal factors (evaluation of these sciences as interesting, complicated, etc.). The images of the language consciousness behind the names of sciences “consist” of knowledge about the objects of these sciences (however, often distorted and even incorrect), about the ways of acquiring knowledge and about the place where this cognition process takes place. The images of the language consciousness of Chinese students comprise a substantial evaluative component, reflecting the difficulty of the sciences and almost non-existent in the language consciousness of Russian students. We emphasize that all these ideas do not go beyond the ordinary ones and have almost nothing to do with the actual situation. This state of affairs takes place, of course, because our participants are not professionally engaged in these types of activities, although they have an “external” view of them obtained through school education.

Keywords: language consciousness, Russian undergraduate students, Chinese undergraduate students, meaning, personal sense, psycholinguistics.