Semantics of a word (in terms of a linguistic experiment)

The article considers semantics of a word and methods of its description. The meaning of a word is considered as a certain reflection of reality, fixed by a language sign. It is common to talk about the existence of a psychologically real (or psycholinguistic) meaning of the word, which is an ordered unity of all semantic components that are actually associated with its sound in the minds of native speakers. This amount of semantic components actualizes an isolated word in the minds of native speakers, in the unity of all the semantic features that form it - more or less bright, nuclear and peripheral. Psychologically the real semantics is structured according to the field principle. The article considers the results of a linguistic experiment aimed at finding shades of meaning and personal implications correlated with the words in moral and ethical conceptions of Russian and English societies. The analysis of the experiment results allowed us to partially reconstruct the world picture of the Russian and English culture representatives. This became possible thanks to the semantic analysis of the interpretations of words received from representatives of two different cultures - Russian and English. The method of interpreting the meaning of a word has not been chosen by chance, since any definition of the meaning of a word is made by specifying the semantic features assigned to a word, and the interpretation of the word is the most effective means of analyzing and synthesizing the semantic structure of the word, its constituent components. Using this method, you can identify a set of features of the subject that are relevant to the everyday consciousness of a native speaker. The method of naive interpretation of words in the work was supplemented by the use of the method of component analysis, which allows us to describe the lexical meaning of a language unit by means of a certain set of semes. The resulting semes and their distribution in the semantic field of the word revealed the relevance of certain semantic components in the moral representations of the two societies. The use of the method of semantic analysis of interpretations made it possible to identify national-specific features of understanding and expressing one's attitude to moral and ethical values and personality traits.