NAME OF THE VALUE MERCY: COMPLEX ANALYSIS

Abstract

Mercy is an object of research in various fields of the humanities. The article provides a comprehensive
analysis of the value name mercy from linguistic, psycholinguistic and sociological perspectives, which allows to identify semantic nuances, associative norms and personal attitude to the value under study. By analyzing dictionary definitions, we have identified a slight dynamics in the meanings: the definitions of explanatory dictionaries cover religious, emotional and actional aspects of human activity. Over time, the evolution of the understanding of the concept of mercy from a divine virtue to a specific human action has been recorded. The author gives his own definition of the lexical unit mercy. The analysis of associative dictionaries published in different years allowed determining the associative norms of the native Russian speakers. The core of the meaning of the value term mercy are the reactions of compassion, kindness and love. The conducted free associative experiment proved that the associations of goodness, love and help form a close semantic knot: mercy is active love (help) aimed at creating the good. The ranking of values showed that mercy ranks fifth among 11 other values, following such categories as “fame”, “power”, “faith” and “duty”. The socio logical survey revealed the works of art that, in the opinion of the respondents, most accurately describe the essence of
mercy. It is noteworthy that all the repeatedly mentioned works are included in the school literature curriculum, which may indicate that discussing these works at school lays the moral foundation of national values.