The paper is devoted to the features of the functioning of the dominant verbalizers of ethical concepts in mass media, considered on the example of the words grace and gratitude . The purpose of the study is to trace the features of the semantic changes of words in modern use in comparison with their main ethical meaning. The article analyzes the data of the explanatory dictionaries of the Church Slavonic and Russian languages, establishes ethically loaded semes that unite verbalizers and testify to their exceptional value in the Russian mentality. The relevance of the study is determined by the analysis of the semantics of about 2000 uses of the words grace and gratitude in mass media, which made it possible to establish a common stylistic orientation - ironic and sarcastic - and the emasculation of the ethical load while maintaining the main denotative meaning. It is proved that the predominance of the material in the understanding of grace developed in the 20th century and is due to the denial of the religious picture of the world, which, however, does not exclude the preservation of ethical semantics in the internal field of ethical concept verbalizers. It was revealed that the ironic, sometimes anti-ethical inclusion of words in texts about topical issues levels their ethical significance and contributes to the spread of distorted semantics, influencing the value scale of native speakers, which is confirmed by a sociolinguistic survey.

The article describes the associative experiment as one of the most productive methods of modern psycholinguistics. The theoretical works of Russian and foreign researchers on the theory and practice of the associative experiment in modern linguistics are reviewed. To illustrate the associative experiment, the analysis of the associative fields, formed by the reactions of the Russian-speaking respondents to the words of Greek origin is presented. The relevance of the work is determined by the fact that the authors make an attempt to study the peculiarities of the perception of borrowed words, using the mechanisms of perception of these or those concepts by native speakers, their evaluation and connotations. This seems interesting not only for contemporary psycholinguistics, but also for semantics, stylistics, cognitive linguistics and other branches of linguistics. The linguocultural value of the study lies in the fact that the experiment allows determine how a word of foreign origin, occurring in Russian, retains the charge of the original culture from which it came. The linguistic material for the study is the most common or typical Greek expressions from the poems of A.S. Khomyakov, a Russian poet of the 19th century, one of the founders of the Slavophile movement. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that the language of A.S. Khomyakovs works is still understudied. The study of the Greekisms as a foreign cultural phenomenon in the texts of a Slavophile poet, whose philosophical concept is connected with "traditionalism" both in the understanding of culture and language, is of scientific interest. We describe the associative fields to the words-stimuli prophet and ether , using Y.N. Karaulov's methodology, which implies the consideration of associations from lexico-syntactic, morphological, cognitive, pragmatic and statistical points of view. From the linguocultural point of view it is important to identify the cognitive features of the perception of the stimuli. The experiment helped to discover that words of Greek origin continue to carry a charge of Greek culture, in addition, they have become an integral part of Russian culture, manifesting themselves in the minds of native speakers through association with Russian precedent texts. The analysis of associative fields made it possible to reveal the peculiarities of the perception of words of Greek origin by native speakers of modern Russian, and to compare the obtained meanings with those that the words had when they were written in the 19th century. The transformation of semantics, as well as the re-accumulation from one meaning to another, the emergence of new meanings, which corresponds to the historical development of words, are noted.