ON THE DESCRIPTION OF THE SPHERE IGNORANCE AND INTEREST OF THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE SPEAKER (in Language Consciousness of the Vorone zh Region)

The article deals with the "sphere of ignorance and interest" in the language, revealed through the analysis of questions posed to Voronezh linguists in 2011–2016, at various public educational events, in applications for radio programs, and telephone service of the Russian language. The aspects of linguistic knowledge relevant to the average speacker of the language and the motives for requesting information are characterized: 1) the actual lack of knowledge in the field of language norms (motivated and unmotivated); 2) interest and curiosity, not related to problems of normative use; 3) the need to help children in their school assignments; 4) the need to express personal (subjective) ideas about language (hypotheses about the meaning and origin of words, replicating the language myths, commenting on the language situation in the city and country); 5) proposals for "improving" the language and speech, especially in media. Such features of the everyday language consciousness of native speakers are revealed as identification of words and objects; desire to find the motivation of the meanings of words, to explain the origin of words on the basis of sound similarity; Inability to comprehend figurative use of words; substitution of analysis of linguistic phenomena by analysis of reality; rejection of variability. According to the research, it is established that the priorities of the inhabitants of the region in the field of linguistic knowledge are: lexical norms, grammatical norms, information about one's own names, spelling norms. A positive trend is the constant demanding of the Voronezh people for the correctness of speech in the mass media.