The concept of "Obshchenie" in the linguistic and cultural consciousness of bilingual students

The object of our study is the linguistic and cultural consciousness of modern speakers of the Russian language. The subject of study became the reactions of language carriers to the verbalizers of the concept of "Obshchenie," which is significant for the Russian linguistic worldview, with the aim of establishing linguistic-cultural connections and describing a fragment of the linguistic-cultural consciousness of contemporary philology students. The article presents the results of a direct associative experiment conducted among 100 bilingual students of the philological faculty at Samarkand State University named after Sharaf Rashidov. The questionnaire of the experiment was compiled using a random word generator based on the verbalizers of the concept of "Communication," which are part of the core zone of its lexical-semantic field, established through the analysis of dictionary definitions. Such a questionnaire allowed us to establish and describe a fragment of the linguistic worldview of Russian language speakers, reflecting their linguistic-cultural consciousness. In analyzing and interpreting the obtained associations, statistical methods were used to determine the predominance of female respondents aged 21 to 25, a quantitative method to establish the frequency of reactions, content analysis, and descriptive methods. The novelty of the study lay in the selection of the group of subjects — speakers of Russian as a second language — and the focus on the investigation of specific stimuli — the verbalizers of one of the significant concepts. The analysis of associations led to the following conclusions. The main tools of our consciousness are analytical (close to dictionary) and combinatory associations. The most frequent reaction to the name of the concept was the phrase "soulful conversation," which corresponds to the dominant semantic share of the concept of "unity" and demonstrates a lively connection with the dominant ethical concept of Russian mentality, "Sobornost." The relevance of this theme is confirmed by associations with other stimulus words (talking - with a friend, with friends, mom, speaking from the heart, teacher, with relatives, with parents, with a friend, family, etc.). A strong influence of literature on consciousness was confirmed (reaction to the stimulus word "speak" – "the tale of the fisherman and the fish"). The results of the experiment open up prospects for new conceptual, linguistic-cultural, and psycholinguistic studies.