Il profilo comparativo della mentalità linguistica e culturale russa e italiana. Una proposta di studio psicosemantico

The aim of this paper is to present a research project based on the comparison between Russian and Italian universal cultural and spiritual values. The above mentioned project has been developed by the Ca'Foscari University of Venice along with the Department of Psycholinguistic of the Institute of Linguistic of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow) and the Faculty of Psychology of the State University of Moscow (MGU). The aim of this research project to was to compare the contents and values of the Russian and Italian cultures, to find out the main national stereotypes and the distinctive characteristics of the Italian and Russian language consciousness, based on the universal system of values in each culture. The main innovative feature of the project is that the study of the above mentioned values is carried out not only by means of their lexicographic presentation, but by considering psycholinguistic aspects as well. Thus, the study includes both traditional investigation of the linguistic material and psycholinguistic experiments, whose combination lead to sufficiently reliable results. This paper is especially focused on the experimental methods used to analyze those universal values and stereotypes.