Асоціативні поля лексем дівчина, дівчинка, дівча, діва, дівуля, діваха як репрезентанти української лінгвокультурної свідомості

The article deals with the linguocultural potential of associative fields of stimuli divchyna, divchynka, divcha, divulya, divaha, that are important ethnocultural signs for Ukrainians. As a result of the free‑association experiment, it has been established that the reactions obtained can be distributed to three groups: universal (available in each stimulus), frequency reaction (occur as answers to three or more stimuli) and unique (are relevant for one or two stimuli). It was discovered that among the universal and frequency reactions there predominates the stereotypical characteristics of the object that reflect the positive, idealized qualities of a young woman and that these are basic components of the Ukrainian language picture of the world. It has been found that unique reactions arise as a result of the actualization of the nucleus of the objective‑conceptual semantics of the word, behind which stands a denotation, and that this may also be the result of stylistic stimulus colour. The linguistic‑cultural analysis of reactions confirmed the statement on the multidimensionality of human memory, which certifies the existence of words‑stimuli simultaneously in three planes – verbal, subject, and actional. The study has demonstrated that the word in this man‑centric dimension has a marked information potential, and constitutes a sign of folk culture, which retains its own linguistic, linguocultural, and encyclopaedic information.