V. I. Dahl’s Dictionary and Modern Associative Lexicography

The article fits into the urgent problem field of dictionary data analysis in terms of their methodological significance, which allows the author to speak not only about the composition and meaning of the units of the corresponding language, but also about the structure of the mental lexicon and the mechanisms of speech-thinking activity of the learners. The author substantiates the correlation of Dahl’s explanatory dictionary, based on the principle of word family method of organization of material, with the principles of compiling modern associative dictionaries, where the word appears in the light of its psychological significance for the eve- ryday consciousness of concrete native speakers. The novelty of this study lies in the postulate that a dictionary entry explicating motivational (formal and/or semantic) connections between related lexical units in the process of their interpretation can be considered as a fragment of an associative-verbal network reflecting the dynamics of transition from the “word family” to the “family of meanings” in the processes of generation and perception of words in living speech. As a result of the analysis, it was revealed that the word-formation precedents that are regularly reproduced (and, accordingly, are urgent for speakers) include: collective and abstract nouns (formed from a verb or adjective); gender marked word-formation pairs; verbs of different aspective semantics denoting various kinds of action (one-time action, repeated action, continuous action); correlative oppositions of ref- lexive and non-reflexive verbs; qualitative adjectives and adverbs; separate functionally specialized, frequent and urgent word forms of different parts of speech, etc. The operational essence of such a dictionary representation fully corresponds to the models of “cluster” and chain connection of words in their pre-speech readiness, indica- ting potential ways of activating such connections in the associative-verbal network. Explication of such potential “routes” based on specially oriented associative experiments is one of the prospects of modern associative lexicography. The practical outcome of the comparative analysis of Dahl’s explanatory dictionary as a unique source for studying national mentality and modern associative dictionaries is connected with the prospect of developing of the functional model of teaching Russian (including Russian as a foreign language).