THE ASSOCIATIVE BACKGROUND OF CLASSICAL GUSTATES

Abstract

After the launch of the associative qualification project of the national gustatory fund, the proposed study conducted an associative experiment, where the stimuli were Ukrainian gustators extracted from works of Ukrainian classical literature. This made it possible to identify important components of Ukrainian culinary culture in their psycholinguistic interpretation, to illustrate the current associative background of vocabulary for food and drink, to reveal the uniqueness of linguamental features of Ukrainians in the gustatory focus of perception of modern respondents. The purpose of our study is to experimentally establish the associative background of classical Ukrainian gustators. The formulated goal was to perform the following tasks: to isolate basic gustatory markers from the contexts of Ukrainian literature; to conduct a FAE on the material of recorded gustatives; to characterise the obtained reaction words according to the frequency criteria; on the basis of the obtained characteristics, to find out the associative background of gustatives and its possible intersections with the linguamental features of Ukrainians and the specifics of Ukrainian gastronomic culture. The object of the article is gustatory markers in their psycholinguistic interpretation. The subject of the study is the obtained associations to gustatory stimuli. The source material of our research is the texts of the Ukrainian fiction works «Eneyida» by I. P. Kotliarevskyi and «The Kaydashev Family» by I. Nechuy-Levytskyi, and the actual material is the 5 most frequent gustators: borsch, braga, bublik, varenukha, vino. The analysis of the texts «Eneyida» and «The Kaydashev Family» has given grounds to speak about the relevance of gustatory vocabulary in these works and its important role in the creation of the national sign. These gustates gave grounds to establish their associative background, to reveal the dynamics of priorities in association (core/peripheral) and the connections between stimuli-gustates and reactions in the structure of the respondents’ internal lexicon (paradigmatic/syntagmatic), which in general illustrates the linguamental features of Ukrainians and their cultural specificity at the level of food-flavour interpretations.