Associations per Word Holidays in the Language Consciousness of Native Chinese Speakers in Comparison with the Spontaneous Stories of the Chinese about the Holidays

Abstract

The article explores two sets of keywords (KW) on the topic “Holidays”. The first one was selected in the course of a special experiment consisting of 20 spontaneous monologues — stories about holidays — pronounced by Chinese in Russian. These monologues were taken from the corpus of Russian monologue speech “Balanced Annotated Text Library”. The experiment involved 40 native Russian speakers, all philologists, who have an idea of what a keyword is. The second set of KWs was obtained during a free association experiment on the word holidays, which was attended by 146 native Chinese speakers living (at the time of participation in the experiment) both in Russia and in China. Comparison of the results of two different experiments showed a great similarity of the obtained sets of KWs, which ensured, among other things, the content integrity of the recorded texts. The proposed method of associative experiment and search for keywords in oral monologue-stories seems to be quite promising in the analysis of corpus material, and the results can be useful both in theoretical and practical terms. In the first case, we can talk about studying the influence of the primary linguistic personality on the secondary linguistic personality, as well as about the features of the formation of this secondary linguistic personality, which is a foreigner studying a second language. In the second case, the obtained data can help to understand whether native Chinese speakers, when speaking and thinking in their non-native Russian language, are using the same or different ways of thinking, same or different lexicon, and also whether the speaker’s gender influences the choice of one or another word. These data can be useful in the practice of teaching the Russian language to a foreign (in particular, Chinese) audience.