The study of collocations with game component in the Russian and English-American discourse

Abstract

The subject of this research is the polysemous noun “game” in the Russian language and the nouns “play”, “game”, “acting”,” performance” in the English language that correspond to different spheres of activity, denoted by the word “game”. The goal of this article consists in determination of most frequent universal collocations with game component in the Russian discourse and their translation equivalents with play, game, acting, and performance component in the English-American discourse. The collocations with game component formed by the scheme adjective + noun and noun + noun, acquired from the dictionaries, as well as Russian and English-American text corpora, served as the material for this research. The article employs the following methods: definitional analysis, contrastive analysis, and etymological analysis. The application of contrastive analysis allowed determining the linear and vector correspondences between the schemes of the indicated lexemes play, game, acting, and performance, as well as revealing the ethno-cultural lacunae. Examination of collocations with game component was conducted on the basis of the Russian National Corpus, Corpus of Historically American English, and Corpus of Contemporary American English; various dictionaries in the timespan (1810-1900) and (2000-2018). It was established that majority of the ten most frequent collocations according to the aforementioned schemes from the Russian National Corpus are present in the Corpus of Historically American English and Corpus of Contemporary American English in the same contexts, but different frequency. The article provides the examples of ethnocultural collocations with game components in the Russian and English-American discourse. It is demonstrated that collocation with the parametric adjectival “big game” has both universal and ethno-cultural characteristics in the English-American language. The relevance of the work is substantiated by recent interest in the development of collocation competence in learning a foreign language.