National Corpus Research Articles

A Corpus-Based Study of Interpersonal Metaphors of Modulation in Academic English

This article presents a study on the synchronic distributions of interpersonal metaphors of modulation based on the British National Corpus (BNC). The synchronic research reveals that interpersonal metaphors of modulation are mode-sensitive to written texts. Regarding genre distribution, metaphorical obligations driven by the explicit orientation dominate fiction texts. In contrast, the objective orientation drives obligations to be more prevalent in academic texts or more technical genres. The objective orientation of metaphorical inclinations is notably prevalent in newspapers and magazines other than academic texts. Besides, the findings highlight that the inherent personal and subjective characteristics of interpersonal modulations remain unchanged in their metaphorical forms, demonstrating less objectivity compared to ideational metaphors in highly technical disciplines.

Принципы лексикографического описания терминологии словообразовательного синтеза (на материале глаголов звучания русского языка)

The purpose of this study is to develop the description principles for lexicographic terminology in word-formation (WF) synthesis of Russian verbs. The scientific novelty lies in the fact that for the first time the terminological system for WF synthesis of verbs is presented as the object of lexicographic description and enhanced with inter-active web-based elements. As a result, it has been proven that this terminological dictionary can serve not only as an informational and methodological instrument, but it also can become an effective teaching tool for studying Russian verb synthesis. The main macro-structure of the designed dictionary features the departure from the traditional alphabetic organization of the material, utilizing instead the principle of zoning by synthesis levels (the root and the word formation levels). Each lexicographic entry is augmented with interactive links to digital Russian explanatory dictionaries and to the Russian National Corpus (RNC) database.

ABSTRACT NOUNS: SOME ISSUES OF DEFINING LEXICAL META-TAGS IN THE NATIONAL CORPUS OF THE KAZAKH LANGUAGE

Abstract nouns are one of the little-studied lexical layers in Kazakh linguistics and Turkology. Nouns that fall under the category of abstractness include a huge vocabulary layer of the Kazakh language, which denote abstract concepts, abstract properties and qualities, and different levels of action and state. A distinctive feature of abstract nouns is also the transfer of the native speaker's relationship to the surrounding world and the world of truth.The purpose of the study is to develop proposals on ways to identify, distinguish structural and semantic features of abstract nouns in the Kazakh language in order to supply the National Corpus of the Kazakh language with lexical and semantic meta–tags.Based on the classification of Akhmet Baitursynuly and other leading Turkologists, the article examines the ways of structural, semantic classification of abstract nouns in the Kazakh language, recognition of semantic features, and definition of their lexico-semantic meta-descriptions. The relation of abstract nouns to national philosophy, national culture, and conceptualization of integral and differential semantics in the consciousness of the language used is analyzed.

The Syntactic Pasts of Nouns Shape Their Prosodic Future: Lexico-Syntactic Effects on Position and Duration.

Phrasal prosody is often viewed as a level of linguistic representation at which the phonetic profile of an utterance varies independently of the lexical items it contains. For example, the same word, when produced at the edges of prosodic phrases, will take longer to produce than when it is produced within the edges of a phrase. Lengthening effects have also been found for words when placed in different syntactic or lexical contexts. Recent evidence suggests that lexico-syntactic information-for example, the global syntactic distributions of words-affects phonetic duration in production, irrespective of other factors. The present study asks whether these lexico-syntactic effects on duration interact with prosodic position within the phrase. Specifically, we ask whether (a) the lexico-syntactic information of a word determines its prosodic position, and (b) whether, beyond any categorical effects on positioning, lexico-syntactic factors affect duration within prosodic positions. We address these questions using the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English. We operationalize syntactic information as the diversity and the typicality of the syntactic distributions of nouns based on a dependency parse of the British National Corpus. We find that earlier positions in the prosodic phrase generally prefer words with higher syntactic diversity. In addition, diversity and typicality modulate duration more reliably in nonfinal positions. Together, our results point to an early influence of lexico-syntactic considerations on prosodic planning.

From Bound to Free: On the Degrammaticalization of the Polish Intensifying Prefix prze-

ABSTRACTBased on empirical material derived from the National Corpus of Polish and supplemental web-based sources, this paper provides an account of a recent change affecting the Polish intensifying prefix prze-, namely the emergence of its autonomous uses. It is argued that the development at issue exemplifies a rare linguistic process known as degrammaticalization, which incorporates phenomena running counter to a prototypical grammaticalization scenario. Firstly, the investigated Polish element seems to have undergone phonetic strengthening, as suggested by its relatively common separate spelling and occasional capitalization in non-edited, spontaneous written data. Secondly, the emancipated form has increased its morphosyntactic flexibility, as reflected by its appearance in reduplicative constructions, co-occurrence with verb phrases, independent occurrence in predicative settings, and the possibility of extraposition. And thirdly, it has been affected by semantic enrichment, i.e., it has additionally acquired an evaluative (positive) sense. The analyzed change is further claimed to be fueled by paradigmatic analogy to the frequent, well-established neoclassical elements super(-) and mega(-), which function as prefixal intensifiers as well as free intensifying and evaluative items, coupled with the general tendency for language change to involve renewal, whereby older expressive forms become superseded by novel, more vigorous expressions with the same meaning contents.

The Passive across Two Registers of Present-Day British English: A Corpus-Based Lexico-Grammatical Perspective

Abstract This paper explores the use of the passive in present-day British English, focusing on its register-specific lexico-grammatical patterns. The interaction of the grammatical structure, lexis, phraseology and register is examined on the basis of two sub-corpora of the British National Corpus 2014 – academic prose and informal conversation. The results have corroborated the findings of previous studies in that the pattern ‘BE / GET V-ed’ is populated by verbal participial forms which create a cline with departicipial adjectives. The communicative needs of registers have been shown to have a decisive impact on the frequency of passive patterns and the specific lexical choices associated with the patterns. In both registers, the ‘BE / GET V-ed’ patterns appear to constitute the core of larger fixed phraseological units, e.g., can’t be bothered to/with, or it should be noted that.

The Russian tradition of religious tolerance perception in the works of Russian thinkers of the XIX-XX centuries and modern realities

The subject of the study is the ethical principle of religious tolerance. The aim was to study the Russian tradition of perception of the principle of religious tolerance and to build a theoretical model of religious tolerance, reflecting both historical experience and ideas. The work uses ethical, culturological and logical-methodological approaches. The first two allow us to consider religious tolerance as an ethical principle and as one of the important components of a person's spiritual life. The latter contributes to the disclosure of the principle of religious tolerance in its entirety. The scientific novelty consists in the fact that an ethical and cultural approach to the study of the principle of religious tolerance is proposed; the Russian tradition of perception of religious tolerance is revealed, a theoretical model of religious tolerance is built; a logical and methodological analysis of religious tolerance as an ethical principle is carried out, which allowed to reveal its structure and interrelated elements; the dynamics of the appeal of domestic authors to the topic of religious tolerance is demonstrated on the materials of the National Corpus of Russian language. The results of the study coincide with the scientific novelty. The relevance of the study is due to the possibility of its use in the development of the national idea of Russia. The practical significance lies in the possibility of applying the results in the field of education and socio-humanities, in legislative, as well as internal and foreign policy activities of Russia.

УСТОЙЧИВИ СРАВНЕНИЯ С НАЗВАНИЕ НА ЕТНОС В БЪЛГАРСКИЯ И РУСКИЯ ЕЗИК

The subject of the present article are stable comparisons with name of ethnicity. It is part of a linguistic and linguoculturological study on stable comparisonsin Bulgarian and Russian. The material excerpted from dictionaries and texts from the Bulgarian National Corpus and the Russian National Corpusis studied in comparative terms. Equivalent relations are established.

A case study of delexical nouns in an EFL setting

This paper demonstrates the relevance of delexical nouns (way, end, case and point) based on corpus findings, course book analyses and classroom experiments. To this end, first, delexical noun functions and frequencies have been studied in-depth in two large English language corpora: Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and British National Corpus (BNC). Additionally, the study reviewed the compound nouns' dictionary meanings. Two coursebooks, namely New English File and Face2Face, have been investigated to determine if delexical nouns are addressed in English language coursebooks to provide ideas to guide the learners in the classroom. Finally, a data-driven learning (DDL) experiment was carried out to assess the participants’ familiarity with the delexical nouns and their collocations. The results of the quantitative analysis from the study demonstrate that delexical nouns are introduced in the course books but are not explicitly explained. Consequently, there are no actual exercises to practise them. The classroom experiment findings reveal the participants’ positive attitude towards how the four delexical nouns, way, end, case and point, were introduced and taught.

PARALLEL CORPUS OF THE KAZAKH AND RUSSIAN LANGUAGES: DEVELOPMENT, OPERATION AND PROBLEMS

The research paper gives a brief overview of the history of the creation of linguistic corpora, describes their classification according to various criteria and types of parallel subcorpuses. The original Kazakh text of M. Auezov's epic novel «Abai Zholy» and its Russian translation, made by A. Kim, were manually aligned at the level of a paragraph (sentence) in a parallel subcorpus being developed as part of the national corpus of the Kazakh language.During the development of the parallel subcorpus, Microsoft Office Excel, Notepad++, Python, Django, MySQL software tools were used. The software architecture and the order of operation of the parallel subcorpus can be represented as follows: 1) texts in two languages were collected using the Excel office program and aligned manually at the paragraph (sentence) level; 2) aligned texts were loaded directly from an Excel file into the MySQL database management system; 3) the downloaded texts were sorted using the Notepad++ word processor program, their statistics were obtained; 4) the Django web server was used to publish the sorted texts on the Internet and provide user requests; 5) the Processing.py program written in Python and equipped with a search function was used to connect the Django web server to the MySQL database management system; 6) the parallel subcorpus software architecture was developed using client-server and MVC (Model-View-Controller) technologies.The parallel subcorpus consists of a database of aligned texts, markups, metamarkups and a search engine, information about the text entered into the subcorpus (metamarkup) includes the following parameters: author, translator, work title, translation title, publication date of the work, translation period, original language, translation language. The search engine allows users to find the desired word by parameters: word, phrase, sentence, and capital letters (in Kazakh and Russian). The paper describes the interface of the parallel subcorpus in Kazakh and Russian and the interface of the results after searching for the desired word through one of the search parameters, the total and non-repeating number of words used in the text in two languages, the number of sentences, as well as numerical and percentage values of the ten most commonly used words in both languages were determined.In addition, in the process of aligning the original Kazakh text of the epic novel with the Russian translated version at the paragraph (sentence) level, the following features were identified: 1) from the point of view of structure, that is, the words used in the paragraph (sentence) are approximately equivalent in number; 2) from the point of view of content, they approximately coincide; 3) do not coincide in structure and content: some paragraphs (sentences) in the original text in Kazakh are translated into Russian incorrectly, superficially or briefly, their approximate meaning is given.

Словацкие субстантивы кратковременности chvíľa, okamih versus немецкие Weile, Augenblick по данным параллельного корпуса

The article examines the semantics of Slovak nouns with the meaning of short duration in relation to their German equivalents. The systems of temporal substances of short duration in Slovak and German demonstrate a significant degree of semantic and formal parallelism. Both languages have different indicators of exact and inaccurate time (minuta, sekunda vs chvila, okamih - Minute, Sekunde vs Weile, Augenblick). Similarly, in both languages, these nouns correlate both in terms of external form (minuta - Minute, sekunda - Sekunde, Weile - chvila: in the latter case, the Slovak noun is borrowed from German) and in terms of internal form (okamih – Augenblick: eyes blinking). It is revealed how the indicators of inaccurate time correlate with each other in terms of the real semantic content of tokens. The study was conducted on the material of the Slovak-German parallel corpus included in the Slovak National Corpus: the source language in the translations used is German. The main translational equivalent of the German Weile is indeed the Slovak chvila (for 2061 occurrences, 1288 cases are translated through chvila, and only 5 through okamih), while for Augenblick the situation is completely different: out of 5760 occurrences in 1471, the lexeme is translated as okamih, and 1952 – through chvila. The ways of transmitting Augenblick in different types of constructions are considered: prepositional, attributive, in constructions with particles and with verbs. At the same time, some of the constructions in the source language in translations are assigned to chvila, a small part is assigned to okamih, in a number of German constructions the number of equivalents of chvila - okamih is comparable. It is revealed that the semantics of Slovak nouns differs from their German correlates, since the Slovak chvila and okamih, in addition to the indefinite quantification of the time interval, have a number of additional connotations. In translations, chvila is oriented to the speaker's point of view, tends to situations of minimal tension or to those that do not involve drastic changes. In turn, okamih is focused on the point of view of an outside observer, as well as on situations of maximum tension - situations with sharp dynamics.

Study of the Axiological Foundations of Russian Statehood: Prospects for the Application of Politico-Textological Analysis

The study of the historical and axiological foundations of Russian statehood is directly related to problems of national and civic identity and addresses the task of ensuring and protecting political sovereignty and national independence. Based on the analysis of a large corpus of works by Russian thinkers, writers, poets, religious and state figures of the 19th century, the content of such basic values as “freedom”, “truth” and “justice” was reconstructed, which maintained their significance throughout the history of Russia, but were substantively transformed in the public ideological-political discourse. The research was conducted based on the database of the National Corpus of the Russian Language (NCRL). In total, work was done with more than 7500 documents created during the period from 1801 to 1900. The main research methods, in addition to the general scientific methodology, were content analysis and politico-textological analysis. The concept of “freedom” was significant throughout almost the entire history of Russia, and in the 19th century, various aspects of it were addressed not only by thinkers and public figures of different ideological orientations, but also by publicists, poets, and writers. Interestingly, the legal and rational understanding of freedom was almost always combined with a moral and even religious content in the works of the authors of this period. The concept of “truth”, despite being used in its substantive sense much less frequently in the 19th century than in previous centuries, still retains its important axiological value in the Russian intellectual tradition and represents a complex moral-social ideological complex. “Truth” as a socialpolitical concept combines both the values and meanings of the Orthodox righteous way of life of each individual and the principles and goals of a truly just social and state system. The concept of “justice” is a cornerstone of the Russian vision of an ideal social and state structure, along with truth and freedom. The specificity of the domestic ideological-political discourse of the 19th century is that the concept of justice is inseparably linked with both the individual and society and the state, receiving moral justification for the necessity of following this principle first and foremost in the name of the common good, and then, as a consequence, in the name of one’s own well-being.

Color Categorization and its Electroencephalography Correlates: A Review of Neuro-Linguistic Oddball Paradigm Research

This paper presents a review of neuro-linguistic studies on color categorization, developed using the oddball paradigm. The selection of research sources was conducted through Russian National Corpus, Google Scholar, Scopus, Web of Science. This study undertook a comprehensive analysis of all relevant articles published within the last 15 years (with the earliest dating back to 2007). Through this analysis, traditional methodologies were identified and five thematic groups of research were established, all of which employed the oddball paradigm. The focus of neuro-linguistic research has been shown to be directed towards (1) studying the neurophysiological mechanisms of color categorization and their temporal parameters; (2) investigating the mechanisms of color categorization in preverbal infants; (3) examining the effect of lateralization; (4) analyzing inter- and intra-linguistic differences in color categorization; and (5) determining the neurophysiological correlates of artificial color categories. Paying particular attention to experimental design, principles of stimulus chromatic characteristics selection, and the results obtained by the authors will enable specialists in the field of theoretical, applied, and comparative linguistics to use the review presented in this article as a basis for planning and developing new experimental research in this area.

ИСПОЛЬЗОВАНИЕ РЕСУРСОВ НАЦИОНАЛЬНОГО КОРПУСА РУССКОГО ЯЗЫКА ПРИ АНАЛИЗЕ СРАВНИТЕЛЬНЫХ ОБОРОТОВ В ОБУЧЕНИИ РУССКОМУ ЯЗЫКУ КАК ИНОСТРАННОМУ

The article considers the specifics of using the materials of the Russian National Corpus (RNC) in the preparation of assignments for the study of comparative constructions in the practice of teaching Russian as a foreign language. It is shown that the RNC has a significant potential in providing extensive and linguistically correctly verified material for the study of comparative constructions. The RNC texts can be taken as a basis of “passive” and “active” exercises on differentiating comparative constructions and syntactic constructs which are similar to comparative constructions in formal connectors and semantics, as well as on identifying special structural characteristics of comparison (object, standard and basis of comparison). The article presents a variety of based on the RNC materials exercises of different types on analyzing the structure of comparative constructions (mode of expression, means of arranging comparisons), their semantics and stylistic potential.

Use of The Lexical Units "Dread", "Maniac" and "Terrible" with in The Framework of The Concept of Markedness in The Turkish National Corpus (1989-2013)

Anlam; dilde gösterge özelliği olan, insanın dünya bilgisine dayalı bazı belirleyicileri bulunan sözcüklerin bağlam ve konu içinde ilettikleri kavramdır. Aslında bir sözcüğün anlamı onun dildeki kullanımıdır. Sözcüklerin anlamı bağlama, kültüre, bireyin bilişsel artalanına göre zaman içinde farklılık gösterebilir. Bir sözcüğün yeni anlamlarda kullanılması, sadece bireyin değil toplumun da düşünce yapısını gösterir. Bu bağlamda bu çalışmanın amacı Türkçede son dönemde “çok” belirteci ile “güzel”, “lezzetli”, “hoş” gibi olumlu anlam içeren sözcüklerin yerine kullanılmaya başlanan “dehşet”, “manyak”, “korkunç” sözcüklerinin derlemde kullanılıp kullanılmadığını saptamak bu sözcüklerin hangi yeni anlamlarda kullanıldığını ve bunun nedenini sorgulamaktır. Bu amaç doğrultusunda “dehşet”, “manyak” ve “korkunç” sözcüklerinin kendi anlamı dışındaki kullanımları Türkçe Ulusal Derleminde (TUDv3.0) sorgulanarak bir veri tabanı oluşturulmuş ve bu veri tabanından elde edilen veriler bulgular yorumlanmaya çalışılmıştır.

Образ глубинки в российских и немецких СМИ

The article considers the media image of the hinterland as objectifying the categories of social exclusion, social inclusion based on the material of the National Corpus of the Russian Language newspaper subcorps and the system of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences digital dictionaries (German). For the purpose of a more in-depth description of this media image, the article also provides a characteristic of a close media image of the province. The research paper establishes synonymic row of units representing the media image of the hinterland, it considers the lexeme of the same name in Russian (glubinka) and the Hinterland lexeme in German as key ones; within the media image of the province key lexemes are provintsiia and Provinz. In the structure of the hinterland media image in both languages, nuclear and peripheral zones and their constituent groups of linguistic means are distinguished: adjectives (derived from horonyms); spatial qualifiers; units nominating the subject; descriptives; deictic units; constructions of opposition (within the framework of the opposition «center – not the center»), verbal units of various actions; constructions of negation. The paper establishes that the media image of the province, compared with the media image of the hinterland, is structured to a lesser extent in the factual material and is positioned mainly within the framework of the opposition «capital – province» (Russian), «city – province» (German), while the socio-cultural stereotyping of this image in the German language is noted. A certain pattern of the social exclusion and social inclusion actualization processes in media texts is revealed. In the Russian language, the media image of the hinterland in the texts of the central media reflects both the processes of social exclusion and inclusion (to a lesser extent); in the texts of regional media – mainly the processes of social inclusion. In German, the reflection of these processes is directly related to the designated territory. The article comes to a conclusion about the national and cultural coloring of the hinterland media image. In the Russian language, this image is characterized by ambivalence (static, problematic / “Russianness”, authenticity, cultural potential). In the German language, the national and cultural specificity of the media image is due to the geographical and spatial location of the territory described.

From Needs Analysis to the Establishment of a University Vocabulary List for English Majors

This paper concerns the academic vocabulary needs of undergraduate English majors in a tertiary context in Azerbaijan. Based on the results of the previous studies, it is suggested that developing an appropriate course material to meet the specific learning needs of these students will be beneficial for them. Thus, this study aims to identify the percentage of the running words and high-frequency word families beyond the 2,000 most-frequent words in the university textbook corpus to help the students to attain 98% lexical coverage. To address English majors’ scant academic vocabulary knowledge, a University Vocabulary List has been created. First, a university textbook corpus comprising the words used in 11 subject-specific course textbooks across subject areas taught at Azerbaijan University of Languages was compiled. Next, the range and frequency distribution of the words beyond the British National Corpus scale 2,000-word families was examined. Finally, the 396 most frequently occurring word families in the corpus were chosen; these formed the proposed University Vocabulary List for English majors, accounting for a 6.96% lexical coverage. The University Vocabulary List for English majors and the British National Corpus 2,000 high-frequency word families, including proper nouns, provide a text coverage of 97.28%, which is only marginally lower than the suggested lexical threshold of 98% suggested by Laufer and Ravenhorst-Kalovski (2010) and Nation (2006). It is, therefore, argued that the University Vocabulary List represents a sufficiently frequent and relevant vocabulary load for English majors whose secondary educational background and first-year general English textbooks have not equipped them for the linguistic challenges they face at the initial stages of their tertiary education. The article concludes by stating the pedagogical implications for developing these learners’ knowledge and use of the most frequent word families.

Перекрестная функционально-синтаксическая омонимия предлогов: сущность, роль и место в системе языка

The article describes crossing functional-syntactical homonymy of prepositions, which is a subtype of grammatical homonymy. Only non-derived simple prepositions are analysed here, since prepositions constituting this subclass are the most promising in relation to homonymy according to a number of characteristics. Prepositions are studied in terms of their functioning in three syntactical structures as types of context: syntaxeme (nearest context), word combination (middle context) and utterance (broad context). The study is based on a synthesis of ideas of structuralism, functionalism and cognitivism. The source of practical material is the Russian National Corpus. The paper emphasizes the hierarchical nature of the cognitive semantics of prepositions, which includes up to 4–5 levels. The study found that crossing homonymy is deep in nature; therefore, in order to identify and describe it, one needs to analyse the lowest layers of semantic hierarchy. Since homonymy does not manifest itself (neutralizes) at the upper level or levels, it can be described as non-absolute (incomplete). It is noted that crossing homonymy is closely related to polysemy. The author considers it more appropriate to proceed not from the idea of strict differentiation of these two categories, but from the idea of their correlation, comparison by a number of criteria, of which the functional-syntactical criterion is the most significant: the difference in semantico-syntactical functions performed by prepositions indicates homonymy. Further, it is revealed that adverbial relations make the biggest contribution to homonymy, followed by objective and attributive relations. Prepositional homonymy is found in both different-case and same-case syntaxemes; in different-case syntaxemes it normally lies deeper in the semantic hierarchy. The study allows us to draw a general conclusion about the importance of crossing homonymy in terms of linguistic economy, which is especially relevant nowadays, considering the constantly growing volumes of data transmitted.

Appellativization of Proper Names – In the Perspective of Corpus Analysis

Abstract The study deals with appellativization of proper names, using as its base selected personal names (surnames). Looking at opinion journalism texts in the Czech National Corpus, corpus SYN, version 11, we investigate aspects of word-formation within appellativization of personal names Masaryk, Beneš, Hitler, Stalin – including frequencies of parts of speech and word-formation types (derivation, composition) with respect to their productivity and word-formation potential.

Polish natural language inference and factivity: An expert-based dataset and benchmarks

AbstractDespite recent breakthroughs in Machine Learning for Natural Language Processing, the Natural Language Inference (NLI) problems still constitute a challenge. To this purpose, we contribute a new dataset that focuses exclusively on the factivity phenomenon; however, our task remains the same as other NLI tasks, that is prediction of entailment, contradiction, or neutral (ECN). In this paper, we describe the LingFeatured NLI corpus and present the results of analyses designed to characterize the factivity/non-factivity opposition in natural language. The dataset contains entirely natural language utterances in Polish and gathers 2432 verb-complement pairs and 309 unique verbs. The dataset is based on the National Corpus of Polish (NKJP) and is a representative subcorpus in regard to syntactic construction [V][że][cc]. We also present an extended version of the set (3035 sentences) consisting more sentences with internal negations. We prepared deep learning benchmarks for both sets. We found that transformer BERT-based models working on sentences obtained relatively good results ( $\approx 89\%$ F1 score on base dataset). Even though better results were achieved using linguistic features ( $\approx 91\%$ F1 score on base dataset), this model requires more human labor (humans in the loop) because features were prepared manually by expert linguists. BERT-based models consuming only the input sentences show that they capture most of the complexity of NLI/factivity. Complex cases in the phenomenon—for example, cases with entitlement (E) and non-factive verbs—still remain an open issue for further research.