Folklore and Reproach: The Experience of Sentiment Analysis Based on Constructions

Abstract

This article presents a pilot experiment to identify reproach in folklore material. The theoretical core of the work is the idea that reproach, like all linguistic phenomena, should have formal expression in language. From which it follows that reproach can be identified in the text on the basis of its formal characteristics, relying on the tools of construction grammar, and not only with the help of semantics and context. Concrete examples demonstrate the effectiveness of the method, its reliability and evidence-based nature in comparison with approaches based on context and pragmalinguistic content. Thus, the study faced two tasks. Firstly, it presents the experiment to conduct sentiment analysis in the absence of any academic corpus of folklore texts at the time of writing the article. Although the volume of fundamental editions of folklore texts is more than significant, the natural absence of specialized lexical and grammatical tagging in such texts, which allows creating corpus queries that are heterogeneous in structure, returns a researcher to manual processing of folklore material without hope of automating the procedure. At the same time, the existence of recognized electronic texts allows you to make accurate queries using the interface of programs for editing and reading documents in PDF and DJVU formats. Secondly, the method of identifying reproach on the basis of constructions and the results of using this method in the form of concrete examples of the reproach in folklore texts are demonstrated. The advantages and disadvantages of working with precise queries in interfaces of PDF-Xchange and DJVU-reader programs are analyzed. The analysis of the obtained results is proposed, as well as the “bottlenecks&8j1; and prospects of such research are discussed.