ASSOTIATIVE EXPERIMENT BASED ON “EXTREMISM” LEXICAL UNIT

Abstract

It may seem that the problem of extremism is not the most important, since the number of registered extremist crimes is extremely small compared to other types of crimes. Extremist activity is carried out in relation to power structures, prominent political figures, social groups, religious communities and religious figures, nations, nationalities. Therefore, we should not forget that these crimes encroach on peace and harmony between various national, religious, ethnic and social groups of all mankind. The relevance of this study is due to the high social significance of the extremist discourse, and the lack of special studies of this phenomenon based on the data of psycholinguistic experiments of Russian-speaking residents in Armenia.

               The main advantage of the associative experiment is its simplicity, ease of use, since it can be carried out with a large group of respondents at the same time. Respondents work with the meaning of the word in “real” life, which allows us to highlight some unconscious, unforeseen components of the meaning.               At the first stage of the obtained results’ analysis, all the received reactions were counted and the most frequent of them were established. Then we conducted a semantic-cognitive (semantic) analysis and grouped all reactions-associations according to a common semantic criterion. Thus, we have determined the semantic components of the associative field of the concept-stimulus “extremism”. At the third stage, we carried out a quantitative analysis of the identified semantic-cognitive components in the structure of the analyzed concept field. The analysis of these data allowed us to establish the most frequent semantic components from which the core of the associative field was formed, less frequent reactions (semantic components) made up its periphery.               As a result of the analysis, it was found that the presence of the most frequent reactions in the associative field of the stimulus word “extremism”, such as terrorism (+ terrorism), extreme (+ extreme), violence, adrenaline, evil, terrorist attack, confirms the fact that Russian-speaking residents in Armenia do not distinguish between the concepts of extremism and terrorism and perceive them as synonyms. These phenomena are described as destructive, posing a threat to the world community, having a negative connotation.

Keywords: extremism, psycholinguistic experiment, free associative experiment, associative fields