ANALYSIS OF THE CONCEPT FAMILY ON THE BASIS OF AMERICAN NATIONAL CORPORA
Journal Title: Науковий вісник Херсонського державного університету. Серія: “Лінгвістика” - Year 2018, Vol 32, Issue
Abstract
The object of our study is the concept FAMILY, one of the most meaningful concepts in American culture. A concept is understood as a set of knowledge, information about a certain material or ideal substance; it acts as the main unit of the naive picture of the world. The purpose of our study is to analyze the frequency of the lexical unit that nominates the concept FAMILY registered in the texts. As the material for our study, we chose the Brown University Standard Corpus of Present-Day American English, or Brown Corpus (BC), containing about 1 million words and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) containing more than 560 million words, which are static and dynamic correspondingly. In our study we used the AntConc corpora manager, developed by Lawrence Anthony. This program is one of the most convenient freeware computer applications, which can be used for educational and research purposes, since it has a convenient and understandable interface and offers options for a powerful concorder, frequency generator, compatibility analyzer, and also visualizes the entry of the subjects words in the studied array. The program provides the ability to search for individual words, phrases, with or without the case of the keyboard, as well as the ability to expand the search using regular expressions. The general quantitative analysis of the frequency of use of the lexeme family, which nominates the concept FAMILY, has shown that it is widely represented in the English language. The percentage of the lexeme family to the general number of tokens is 0.035% (345) in BC and 0.048% (272121) in COCA. In both cases, the lexeme family is most often found in texts derived from magazines and newspapers. Moreover, the concept name FAMILY has a tendency for steady and strong frequency increase in diachronic perspective that allows us to conclude about the growing importance of a family as a social unit. Consequently, a significant quantitative expression in the language suggests that the concept FAMILY is very important for American mentality, since it is widely verbalized in the corpora.
Authors and Affiliations
Oksana Skobnikova
Keywords
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