Linguistics and Literature Studies 4(1): 17-22, 2016 http://www.hrpub.org DOI: 10.13189/lls.2016.040103 Associative Testing in Phraseology Branka Barcot Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Croatia Copyright © 2015 by authors, all rights reserved. Authors agree that this article remains permanently open access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 International License Abstract No word exists as an isolated item in our minds; rather, verbal strands connect one word with another. Associations dictionaries identify these strands or connections. The main aim of this paper is to show how to build a phraseological and paremiological corpus, which is anchored in the mental lexicon of a speaker. An extensive associative testing (of 1060 native speakers of Croatian, German and Russian) was carried out. The survey was conducted by means of the associative method (field: wild animals). The testing is intended for practical use, e.g. in teaching German and Russian as a foreign language (in phraseological didactics). Keywords Associative Lexicography, Phrasemes, Proverbs, Phraseological Didactics, Croatian, German, Russian 1. Introduction Associations are said to reveal one’s mental anatomy, and associations dictionaries to give us numerous opportunities to explore various aspects of a language in a non-traditional manner. These dictionaries reflect the fixed lexical and associative norms that are typical of a certain language community at a given time. In this paper, 1 I will present the associative testing conducted for my doctoral thesis [1]. The research topic of the doctoral thesis was Croatian, Russian and German phrasemes with wild animals as their component and in the analysis of the phrasemes the linguoculturological approach was applied. I will give the definition of verbal associations, explain what associative testing is and how it can be used to access the phraseological corpus stored in the mental lexicon of native speakers. In this paper, the emphasis will be on the statistical data and on the interpretation of the data obtained exclusively through associative testing. 1 The paper was presented at the international conference “Applied Linguistic Research and Methodology” organized by the Croatian Applied Linguistic Society in April 2015 in Zadar, Croatia. It is presently being published in the proceedings of the conference in German. 2. Verbal Associations Association psychology defines associations as connections between two or more mental processes (feelings, perceptions, thoughts, movements, etc.) reflected in the fact that the emergence of one process triggers one or more other mental processes (A. A. Karelin cited according to [2]). Predrag Piper [2] points out that in contemporary linguistics, dominated by cognitive views, verbal associations are often referred to as linguistic expressions of associations among concepts. When he speaks about verbal associations and their lexicographic description, he mentions some related concepts from the philological and philosophical tradition of the antiquity. These are Aristotelian laws, similar to the basic associations typologies that also exist today: the law of contiguity 2 , the law of similarity 3 and the law of contrast 4 . Zeno, Epicurus and St. Augustine had similar views on this subject. In later periods, other philosophers reshaped Aristotle’s laws, from the scholastics to the more modern thinkers of the 17 th century. However, it should be pointed out that Aristotle never used the concept of association; rather, it was John Locke who introduced the notion of association of ideas in the context of the first experiences most important for people since we are all born tabula rasa. There are other principles such as coincidental associative connections based on random similarities in the phonemic composition of words and so on, but these are not in the focus of this paper and will not be mentioned beyond this point. Natal’ja Vladimirovna Ufimceva [3] defines verbal associations as the materialization of the connection between psychic phenomena during which verbal prompts, or prompt words (which serve as stimuli), elicit verbal responses or response words. This materialization is achieved through the linguistic sign. The relations between the prompt word and the response word may be superordinated 5 , subordinated 6 or 2 According to the law of contiguity, ideas that have once appeared in spatial, temporal or sequential proximity, tend to continue to appear in that same connection. 3 This law applies to situations where together with a given idea, another, very similar idea also appears. 4 The law of contrast states that opposing ideas tend to trigger each other. 5 Ufimceva illustrates the superordinated relationship between the prompt word and the response word with this Russian example: kuvshin: posuda (lit. jug: tableware). 6 The pair posuda: kuvshin (lit. tableware: jug) is the example of the