PSYCHOLINGUISTIC INTERPRETATION OF THE CONCEPT OF HOME: UKRAINIAN REALITIES
Authors: Kovalevska T. Yu. , Denysevych O. V. 
Published: October 2024

Since the beginning of the war, Ukrainians have suffered many heavy losses and painful changes. One of the such changes in the usual way of life were forced to move to safer zones for accommodation, search for shelter, temporary home, which are the basic value in the psychomental environment space of Ukrainians. However, it is this concept that has undergone moral and ethical changes in the realities of war, semantic transformations in the conceptual and linguistic picture of the world of our compatriots. Identify this dynamic, find out the semantic dominants of awareness the analyzed concept, the vectors of its perceptual characteristics provides an opportunity to psycholinguistic interpretation, primarily an associative experiment that makes it possible obtaining "live", up-to-date models of processes of deep reconstruction of the environment the world. The object of research is the associative meaning of the concept of HOME as the basic one in the system value coordinates of Ukrainians, the subject is the perceptual specificity of this concept in the conditions of the Russian-Ukrainian war. The leading method used in the work was experimental-a free associative experiment, as well as an analysis of the obtained results and further synthesis for obtaining objective generalizations and verification author’s hypotheses related to the assumption of semantic dynamics of basic concepts under the influence of crisis exogenous factors. Component-based methods are also applied, descriptive and comparative analysis. Theoretical value and scientific novelty of the obtained results the results are determined by a certain contribution to the deepening of theories of psycholinguistics, semantics, linguoculturology, in particular problems of factors of dynamics of perceptual processes, their influence on the semantic transformations of basic concepts in projections on the specifics of the national mentality. The practical significance of the conducted research can to be implemented in the educational process in appropriate lecture courses, in lexicographic in practice and in the scientific work of applicants for higher education at various levels. Actual the material includes more than 200 reactions received from respondents from different social groups.
The results of the free associative experiment, where the stimulus was HOME allowed us to form its associative field (2022), identify coincidences and discrepancies in the perception of the analyzed concept with the corresponding field represented in Ukrainian associative dictionary S. Martinek (2002-2005), find out the semantic dynamics and emotional-expressive halo of the word-stimulus in various extralingual conditions. So, it is common to understand the HOME as a ‘place of family’, ‘place of residence’, ‘apartment’, ‘room’, ‘house’, which dominate the structure of the associative field of the early 2000s. However, there are fewer semantic-related reactions in the 2022 associative field ‘home-house’, and much more reactions that have non-constant, neutral character, and show feelings, emotions in relation to this concept, having a bright connotative, for example, home is comfort, warmth, peace, protection, safety, comfort and others, as well as typical reactions only for modern realities like security, Ukraine, which illustrates heightened in the realities of war awareness of seemingly ordinary phenomena, but in reality — conceptual and fundamental values.