Speech Practices of Protest: An Associative Research on Semantics

The beginning of the 21st century was marked by the emergence of new socio-political movements calling for social change throughout the world. This exacerbated social contradictions and led to increased social tension. Young people, being the category of the population most susceptible to social inequality and social injustice, get actively involved in protest activity. The aim of this research is to identify the current features of the “protest” notion in the minds of Moscow universities’ students. The research is carried out based on free and directed types of associative experiment. The author identified frequent and single verbal associations for the stimulus word protest and stimulus phrase protest is ... that were subsequently grouped into 15 features of the “protest” notion. Two most quantitatively represented features correspond to the interpretation of the word “protest” given in the dictionary by S.I. Ozhegov. Structuring and generalization of the data obtained indicate that within the lexical-semantic field “protest” disagreement is the nuclear associate, ‘presenting one’s position’ is the key feature, the models “noun (center word) + noun / pronoun” and “noun + noun (center word)” are the most productive grammatical means to verbalize associations. The analysis of grammatical patterns has enabled the development of a detailed image of protest as a social action in the minds of informants.