Psycholinguistic potential of political concepts of the election campaign (on the example of the slogan-motto "Army. Language. Faith.")

The paper presents the results of psycholinguistic analysis of the stimulus words army, language, faith (in Ukrainian) as concept-forming nominations in the structure of the slogan- motto “Army. Language. Faith.”, which was used during the 2019 presidential election campaign in Ukraine, i.e., in the context of a particular discursive practice. In the study, the method of free associative experiment based on the speech influence theory was used that allowed to interpret the semantics of the analyzed concepts as well as to establish their closest connections and logical relationships with other concepts. Verbal reactions to a political slogan as a whole and to its individual structural units as concept-forming nominations are interpreted as verbal representations of cognitive features of concepts. The first two stages of the implementation of slogan-motto “Army. Language. Faith.” into mass consciousness, i.e. attracting attention to the text and optimization its perception, were successfully realized. The third stage, i.e. acceptance of the content, was complicated by certain extralinguistic and linguistic factors, such as the use of words “language”, “faith” which possess rather abstract, non-specific semantics. The results of the free associative experiment make it possible to identify markers of the deep (including subconscious) mechanisms of verbal and non-verbal behavior of individuals, which can be used to form new and transform old political concepts.