Concept of Fate: Psychosemantic Analysis

The concept of fate is an important marker of Russia’s national mentality and culture. It has undergone quite a diversity of cultural paradigms throughout Russian history. According to numerous studies, the concept of fate reflects some national traits that appeared as a result of cultural, economic, and political interaction. Linguistic symbolism expresses its semantic meaning in different ways on the associative-figurative level, which attracts both linguists and psychologists. The research objective was to identify the maximal number of cognitive features of the concept of fate. The review covered publications on cognitive psychology, e.g., perception, basic concepts of cognitive linguistics, cultural linguistics, etc. The experimental part of the research relied on the method of free definitions and the indirect associative experiment, which included academics and students of the Altai State University. It revealed the actual content of the concept and its interpretative field. The methods of semantic differential, as well as the quantitative and qualitative indexing, made it possible to study the emotional attitude to the concept. The gestalt approach provided access to the concept through the abstract perception of the fate image as an invisible construct, often interpreted as destiny or doom. The collocations of the word fate and the semantic content of the concept included such adjectives as inexorable, unpredictable, and benevolent. In a qualitative aspect, the indirect associative experiment revealed the emotional and mental characteristics of fate in Russian linguistic consciousness. The associative connections demonstrated the predominance of a positive attitude to the idea of fate at the conceptual and axiological levels.