Association experiment as a method of studying professional consciousness

The paper describes an attempt to consider a relevant for the modern philology problem of the perception of the past within modern social and professional consciousness. The authors choose the material in one of the most important concepts of the Old Russian book-learning - "weaving of words", as enshrined in the same form as in the history and theoretical criticism of literature and in the philological science in general. Identifying features of the perception of the term can give valuable information to describe the features of contemporary social and professional (philological) consciousness and the dynamics of their changes. The methods of free association experiment and complex associative method were chosen for dealing with this specific material. Thus, the authors have identified new educational opportunities for this kind of experiment, confirmed the explanatory power of this method and obtained an interesting material for identifying the features of perception of the term "weaving of words" in trained professional (philological) consciousness. The results could be useful for researchers involved in the history of Russian literary language and literary criticism, for historians of literature, psycholinguists, cognitive science specialists, linguists interested in methods of diagnosis and research on the state of social and professional awareness, as well as diagnosis features of perceiving superior creatures of historically distant eras and cultural memory or oblivion.