The Associative Field of a Word as a Multilingual Structure (Ваsed on The Mass Free Associative Experiment With Ukrainian Social and Political Lexis)

The article deals with the analysis of the associative fields of the Ukrainian social and political lexis in the aspect of the language of the reactions. It is written on the basis of the mass free associative experiment conducted with Ukrainian respondents aged 18 – 22. The experiment was organized in Ukraine in 2013-2016. It involved more than 1000 respondents living in 12 regions of Ukraine (eastern, western, southern and northern parts of the country); the stimuli list contained 100 lexical units. More than 33 000 reactions were analyzed with the help of the special computer programme STIMULUS, which is now developed in the first Ukrainian on-line associative tool STIMULUS. The results proved that associative fields are not monolingual, but multilingual structures. The associative fields of the Ukrainian social and political lexis include the reactions in Ukrainian (major part, 80 % at an average), Russian (4 % – 8 %), English (1 % – 2 %), other languages (Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, Italian; less than 0,5 %), symbols (1 % – 2 %) and refusing to respond (3 % – 41 %). There were cases of sudden Ukrainian reactions made by the Russian-speaking Ukrainians on the stimuli прапор "flag", незалежність "independence", національність "nationality", єдність "unity" while other reactions were Russian. The reactions in terms of their language are influenced by the respondents' mother tongue, government language policy, political situation, politics, intercultural communication. The perception of the word semantics may precede the perception of the word language. The perspective of the research is to study the lexis of other thematic groups in the aspect of the language of the reactions.