THE CONCEPT MERCY: INSTABILITY OF THE TOKENS

Abstract

The article describes an experimental study of understanding the concept MERCY in students’ everyday consciousness (n80, 18-19 years old) and the relevant concept scenario, which together form a cognitive construct on the time interval of the individual’s speech-thinking activity. The concept MERCY and the concept scenario are connected by cognitive-associative links due to the tasks assigned to the respondents. The revealed conceptual features of the two concepts are the basis for dividing all responses into three levels: full conceptual correspondence, incomplete conceptual correspondence and lack of conceptual correspondence. The relevance lies in the need to study, on the one hand, the concept of MERCY, which causes difficulty in understanding, and on the other hand, the relevant concept scenario, which is formed due to the activation of associative-cognitive links and has a linguistic representation. The difficulty in understanding the concept MERCY is connected with the ambiguity of its interpretation in lexicographic sources with the lack of clarity in interpreting mercy in Russian Biblical texts. The aim of the work is to identify the levels of conceptual correspondence between the established conceptual features in the linguistic expression of the concept MERCY and conceptual features in the linguistic expression of the concept scenario based on the coincidence or discrepancy of features. Matching features form a cognitive construct. Research methods: the questionnaire method allows us to get the students answers, that are then analyzed to identify the main features of the concept MERCY; the method of quantitative counting and ranking the opportunity to find out the main conceptual features encoded in the everyday consciousness of respondents; the method of conceptual analysis; the method of identifying conceptual correspondence leads to the identification of three levels of correspondence depending on the degree of coincidence or discrepancy of conceptual features found when we analyzed the responses of the students, lexicographic sources of the Russian language and the sources of Orthodox culture. The novelty of the work consists in the fact that a methodology is being developed to establish a conceptual correspondence between the concept and the concept-scenario, in which overlapping conceptual features are detected or not detected. As a result of the conducted research, the unstable structure of the concept MERCY is determined, which is established by the transformation of conceptual features and does not have an unambiguous interpretation in lexicographic sources. The main and only coded feature in the everyday consciousness of the subjects was the feature of ‘help’ (the third part of the students (30.86%)). A small percentage (14, 81%) of the students offered two features of ‘help’ and ‘compassion’. A third of the students (32.12%) could not describe their understanding of the concept MERCY. In the process of establishing conceptual correspondence, we found possible to identify a small percentage of respondents (8.75%) whose answers testify to full conceptual correspondence. The percentage of incomplete conceptual correspondence (47.5%) and the percentage of lack of conceptual correspondence (37.5%) showed a low level of understanding the concept of MERCY by students. We see further prospects for this research in conducting similar studies on the main spiritual and moral concepts and developing systematized material aimed at eliminating the lacunarity and instability of conceptual features in the structures of concepts.