THINKING BETWEEN RATIONAL AND INTUITIVE: COMPONENT ANALYSIS IN THE PSYCHOLINGUISTIC FIELD

Abstract

The current linguistic research focuses on the analysis of linguistic facts in support of the hypothesis that people tend to believe that they think rationally and make rational decisions, and this tendency has its linguistic expression in lexical linguistic objects that they use for communicative purposes. In order to place emphasis on the “rational” in their way of thinking when communicating with others, native speakers “rely” more on lexical units grouped in a lexico-semantic field expressing rationality rather than on lexical units combined in a lexico-semantic field expressing intuitiveness. The paper also presents a linguistic model called the Triangle of Thought, which presents the synonymous relationships between selected lexemes that express co-referentiality. The presented component analysis of semantic synonyms of the Gedanke lexeme in the German-speaking semantic space supports the assumption that the German language is dominated by lexemes whose semantic features form the profile of “rationality”, in comparison with fewer lexical units whose semantic features characterize “intuitiveness”.