Associative connection “war – victory” in the Russian language consciousness of students and military cadets (psycholinguistic aspect)

The paper focuses on studying the associative connection “war – victory,” as represented in various Russian associative databases. The databases under examination include two all-Russian associative dictionaries of the end of the last century, two modern Russian regional associative bases combining verbal reactions of students who live in the European part of Russia and Siberia, respectively, and the sub-corpus of associations obtained in the psycho-linguistic experiment with the military cadets of one of the Russian military academies. The study shows that the associative connection “war – victory” has a low degree of relevance in the ordinary linguistic consciousness. This phenomenon, also found in American, British, French, and Spanish associative databases, turns out to be universal and does not depend on geographical area, generation, or nationality. The most frequent reactions to stimulus “war” obtained from Russian civilian students in different years and different geographical regions may be grouped into approximately four semantic zones: the war as the opposite of peace, Lev Tolstoy’s novel “War and Peace,” death, the Great Patriotic war (1941–1945). The rele-vance of the associative connection “war – victory” is stronger in the linguistic consciousness of the military servicemen. The reactions to stimulus “war” in the military cadets’ associative base show that the cadets refer the word war not to a historical event but a professional activi-ty, with victory being its product and desirable result. Thus, the professional identification of experiment subjects is found to affect the semantic and statistical characteristics of the associates.