Application of the technologies of corpus linguistics in the study of collocations

Abstract

The subject of this research is the polysemous borrowed noun “credit” in the Russian language and noun “credit” in the Anglo-American language. The goal lies in determination of the national-specific and universal collocations with the component “credit” in the Russian discourse and their translated equivalents in the Anglo-American discourse of the XIX and XXI centuries. Analysis is conducted on the collocations of "credit" formed in accordance with the pattern adjective + noun revealed by statistical methods that calculate the frequency of joint use in the dictionaries and linguistic corpora of the Russian and Anglo-American texts. The use of contrastive analysis allowed establishing the linear and vector correspondences between the lexeme "credit" and national-specific lacunae. The article provides the examples of the national-specific collocations with the component “credit” in the Russian and Anglo-American discourse. The research employs the Russian National Corpus, Corpus of Historical American English and the Corpus of Contemporary American English in the diachronic aspect within the time span of 1800 – 1900 and 2015 – 2019. The relevance of this work lies in the fact that the knowledge of collocations and formation of collocation competence are the essential requirements in modern communicative approach towards learning a foreign language.