Cognitive Term Frame: Creation of a Dictionary Entry on the Basis of a Specialized Text Corpus

Abstract

The study deals with testing a specialized text corpus on the example of a number of cognitive linguistic terms with the hypernym frame. The corpus includes a subcorpus of scientific texts and a subcorpus of journalistic texts. The former is represented by 13 journals indexed in the RSCI; the latter one is represented by 10 significant Russian newspapers & magazines. The collected texts were lemmatized and tokenized, as well as automatically marked up using the Universal Dependencies standard. The corpus is used for creating a learner’s cognitive linguistic term dictionary. This lexicographic source includes 60 major terms in the university disciplines within cognitive sciences. The novelty of the approach is due to the thesaurus-encyclopedic type of dictionary which allows scholars to describe the word both as a term (a minimal component of scientific knowledge) and as a unit of scientific text in its various collocations and ontological relations (synonymy, quasi-synonymy, class-subclass; polysemy, etc.). The basis for describing the term systemic relations is corpus statistics: analysis of concordances, collocations, and n-grams. The results of using a specialized text corpus are presented on the example of a terminological field with the dominant frame. With the help of concordance lists, contexts of term usage are revealed and its derivational relations are established. The semantic and grammatical relationships of the term are characterized through n-grams analysis. Synonyms, hyponyms, hyperonyms of the term are described based on the study of collocations. The Dashinimaeva-Wang hypothesis about the links between the terms ‘concept’, ‘frame’, ‘gestalt’, and ‘image’ was also tested. Briefly characterized were the semantic transformations of the scientific term in the media discourse. Besides, systemic relations of the terms identified on the basis of corpus statistics were confirmed by the method of interpretative analysis of the contexts obtained from concordance lists. The data of automatically selected associative measures also largely agree with the results of the associative experiment carried out in the framework of the study.