Psychosemantic dimensions of basic concepts of economic discourse

Abstract

The purpose of the study is the explication and systematization of the nuclear verbal associative reactions of students of economic and philological specialties to the leading economic categories and concepts. Methods. In our research was used the method of free associative experiment with the involvement of economic categories and concepts as stimulus words. The sample of respondents is formed on the principle of random selection and the rule of informed consent. The concepts recorded by the results of the associative experiment were subjected to the procedure of content-Analytical processing using the computer program Textanz (version 2.4.2.0). The method of psycholinguistic textual analysis is taken as a conceptual basis for processing and interpretation of the empirical data. The results of the content analysis of the recorded verbal reactions were generalized and compared with respect to the representatives of the two subgroups, as well as with the scientific definitions presented in modern thematic dictionaries. Results. The following universal tokens are empirically singled out as the nuclear associative reactions of respondents in the context of perception and comprehension of leading categories and concepts of the economic discourse, in particular: money , people , products (goods) , production , plant (factory) , debt (loan) , advertising , management , salary (income) , wealth , market , business , science (subject) , village (farm) and products . Although, in general, future economists have naturally demonstrated more verbal associations, as well as higher coefficients of the lexical diversity of relevant reactions, there are exceptions to this general rule, indicating possible zones of weakness for the potential psychological manipulation of any economic activities. This applies, in particular, to such key categories as market and money , which have a significant affective commitment in the overall structure of the studied type of discourse.