Citation

Novikova-Grund MW. Shagi/ Steps 2019; 5(1): 136-150.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019)

DOI

10.22394/2412-9410-2019-5-1-136-150

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The article presents some results of the psychosemiotic research related in our monograph [Novikova-Grund 2014], which focused on proving the following hypotheses: 1. An individual's unique picture of the world does exist (it is neither an image nor a metaphor); 2. An individual's unique picture of the world is reflected on his texts in such a way that it can be presented as a map based on the formal characteristics of the text. An important element of the unique picture of the world of an individual is the use of the verb forms of Future Tense or their avoidance. The use of Future Tense by a person in his (her) spontaneous (not edited) texts is a result of his (her) free and unconscious choice. Comparative analysis of texts of a control group which consisted of people who had made numerous attempts at committing suicide and texts of an experimental group which consisted of people who had never made any such attempts showed a quantitative difference in the use of forms of Future Tense: more than 60% in the group of those attempting suicide and less that 1% in the experimental group (100% referred to all the tense forms used in the text). The next experimental stage was to calculate the relative percentage of Future Tense verb forms in a large body of texts produced by 19th-20th century authors who are known to have never attempted to commit suicide. A rather simple mathematical method of calculation, created for solving this particular problem, allowed us to confirm with confidence that the coincidence of these numerical results could not be an accident. Interpreting the results withing a psychological, rather that a linguistic framework allowed us to convincingly link both the use and the avoidance of Future Tense forms with the existential fear of death and with different strategies for coping with it. © M. W. NOVIKOVA-GRUND

Language: ru

Keywords

Suicide; Avoidance; Grammatical tense; Picture of the world; Psychosemiotics; Unconscious choice