ОСОБЕННОСТИ РЕПРЕЗЕНТАЦИИ ОБРАЗА КАЗАНИ (НА МАТЕРИАЛЕ РУССКОЯЗЫЧНЫХ И АНГЛОЯЗЫЧНЫХ ИСТОЧНИКОВ КОРПУСА GOOGLE BOOKS)

Abstract

The article presents a cross-lingual diachronic analysis of the linguistic image of Kazan recorded in Russian and English Corpora of Google Books within the period between years 1800 and 2019. The material of the research comprises 6236 texts in the Russian subcorpus and 9858 texts in the English subcorpus compiled for the study. The frequency of onym ‘Казань’ was the highest in early 19th and 20th centuries, while that of ‘Kazan’ – in late 20th century. The range of lexical patterns of both Russian English contexts of the studied words is wide with predominantly neutral and, in rare cases, negative connotations in the past, while modern contexts are most notably positive and neutral. In both languages subcorpora, the highest context frequency is registered for the words belonging to the following thematic groups: “City”, “Historical personality”, “Landscape”, “Religion”, as well as verbs denoting acquisition of an object and adjectives denoting time. The range of typical semantic roles of the onyms ‘Казань’ and ‘Kazan’ during the period studied, 1800–2019, widens from Locative and Patient in the texts of the 19th century to Agent, Posessor, Experiencer in the 20th and 21st centuries. The latter is caused by changes in the national and global arena and the role of Kazan in the country and the world. The research shows that, in the modern discourse, the word collocates with the verbs denoting activity, verbal behavior, physical action, and struggle. The article also provides the authors’ insights into the limitations of the corpus used as the source of research.