Dynamic models in sociolinguistics and socio-communicative attitudes of the russian language personality in the post-soviet period

The article focuses on the range of scientific issues which have been studied by sociolinguists who apply dynamic models mainly to the material of the English language. Priority is given to network models and their predecessors - the study of relationships within semantic fields. The author's observations of the circulation of the meanings as they are reflected in the Russian associative-verbal network (hereafter AVN) provide supporting evidence for the links between the dimensions of socio-communicative networks (strength, density, direction of contacts) and the emergence of favorable conditions for socially significant language changes. Sociolinguists discovered this type of correlation earlier using other methods on English materials. The instability of the social environment of the post-Soviet world manifests itself (within three generations) in the dynamics of socio-communicative attitudes concerning the ways people manipulate the bodies of language units. Thus attested shifts in motivational orientations of the Russian language personality can be studied further on as potential activators of socially conditioned language changes. The AVN materials allow scientists to consider the psychological dimensions in their interpretations of sociolinguistically significant dynamics. The use of AVN models in the light of actual (within 3-4 generations) diachrony opens up the prospect of developing associative variantologyas a new branch of experimental psychosociolinguistics; the study of the circulation of word meanings in the semantic field of culture provides valuable empirical data for ethnopolitical sociolinguistics.