CHANGE AS A SUBJECT OF PSYCHOLINGUISTIC RESEARCH
The article discusses one of the modern psycholinguistic topics of research, which is the issue of identification and comprehension of "markers of change" - artificial (utterances) and natural (events) indicators of changes in a person’s functioning and the development of his or her relations with other people, as well as the methodologies used to study these indicators. Analysing the scripts of psychological counseling – the practice aimed at promoting personal development, stimulating a person to make productive changes in his or her life and comprehend it – the author considers the main features of these techniques and basic ways to identify "markers of change".
The analysis of “markers of changes” proposed in the present study relies on the fact that everything in the world is interconnected and, therefore, even the most destructive, dangerous events and phenomena can be identified, prevented or corrected in one way or another. Drawing on this, the author highlights the ineluctability of changes and argues that any such change may cause serious transformations.
Author’s reasoning is based on the differentiation of explicit and implicit signals, which active and accurate identification not only allows you to predict the “unpredictable”, but also helps intervene in the course of the processes, adjusting them with minimum material, psychological and mental resources involved. The author concludes that the meaning manifests itself not in a single “marker of changes”, but in their series, and the efficiency of their identification directly depends on the skills of “active listening”.
The study ultimately proves that “markers of changes” can be allocated in research works focusing on comparative analysis of texts and scripts as “scraps of reality”: the intertext model of comprehension helps not only recognise the existence of explicit and implicit (“weak”) signals able to radically alter the way reality is being comprehended, but also develop the methods for successful intervention in a person’s development and the evolution of his relations with others, as well as reconstruct his or her development and functioning patterns in general.
Arpentieva, M.R. (2016). Change as a subject of psycholinguistic research. Issues of Applied Linguistics, 23, 7-47.