A thematic group through the prism of verbal associations (based on the material of TG “Supernatural beings”)

The article considers the thematic group “Supernatural beings” in the associative-verbal network of Russian native speakers. Russian associative dictionaries, as well as the texts of the Russian National Corpus (the main subcorpus, the period from 1950 to present time), were used as the research material, which allowed us to compare associative data with discourse, to establish correlations between the functional features of the group’s units and their associative connections in the minds of Russian native speakers. The degree of inclusion of lexical units in the consciousness of Russian speakers is revealed: it is clarified which words were used as stimulus during the associative experiment, what reactions were received from the subjects, which words acted as reactions to stimulus-units not included in the thematic group “Supernatural beings”; nominative units were also identified that were not simultaneously set as stimulus during the associative experiment and did not arise in the subjects’ minds in acts of verbal reaction, i.e. which are neither stimulus nor reactions in associative experiments. The main groups of reactions were identified and described: paradigmatic, thematic, syntagmatic, phonetic, and precedent reactions. It has been established that the TG “Supernatural beings” is a meaningful component in the associative-verbal network of Russian native speakers. The analysis of verbal associations involving units from the TG “Supernatural beings” has shown that religion is the main sphere of generating supernatural images; Slavic and foreign mythology, fairy tales, and folk beliefs are inferior to the religious sphere and have almost the same potential in terms of generating concepts of supernatural beings.