EVERYDAY MEANINGS OF A POLYSEMANTIC WORD THROUGH THE PRISM OF GENDER DIFFERENCES

Abstract

The article puts forward the use of an associative approach to the description of everyday meanings of a polysemantic word taking into account native speakers’ gender characteristics. The authors set the objective to reconstruct the pattern of meaning representation of a polysemantic word in linguistic consciousness, to identify general and specific characteristics of word meanings conditioned by gender differences in the native speakers’ linguistic world view. The stated objective is achieved by a questionnaire survey with the succeeding description of the collected linguistic material – associative fields of bionyms. The authors draw conclusions about general meanings of bionyms caused by the reflection of objective features of referents and about semantic differences determined by gender stereotypes typical of native speakers. The revealed differences find expression at the level of identification of separate meanings of polysemantic words as well as at the level of concept meaning semantics.