AXIOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE NOTION OF OBEDIENCE IN THE ENGLISH LINGUISTIC PICTURE OF THE WORLD
Journal Title: Вісник Одеського національного університету. Філологія: літературознавство, мовознавство - Year 2016, Vol 21, Issue 2
Abstract
The notion of obedience has been the focus of scientific studies since the 1960-s, when the American researcher Stanley Milgram conducted his first experiments in the “Obedience to Authority” series. The experiments were aimed at gaining understanding of the psychological processes that allowed ordinary German citizens to personally participate in executing millions of innocent people in concentration camps under the Nazi rule. However, linguistic studies of obedience are virtually non-existent, which determines the topicality of our research. Thus, the paper makes an attempt of linguistic analysis of the notion of obedience; more specifically, it seeks to determine axiological features of this notion registered in the modern English language. Stage One of the investigation involves the analysis of dictionary definitions and yields grounds to state that 1) key features of the adjective obedient are represented by those of willingness to perform certain actions and pressure exercised by an authority; 2) the meanings of the lexical unit under consideration that are registered by reputable monolingual dictionaries are found to be neither positively, nor negatively charged. Based on the above, Stage Two of the research is aimed at determining the emotive coloring of the lexical unit ‘obedient’ by means of considering its immediate context. At this stage, the data obtained from the British National Corpus testifies to a predominantly positive connotation of the lexical unit under analysis, especially when the latter is used in the context of women. At Stage Three, the investigation makes an attempt at detecting collocational peculiarities of the adjective ‘obedient’. According to the analysis of the data obtained from the British National Corpus, most common collocates with the adjective ‘obedient’ (based on their t-score) are the nouns servant, wife, army, dog.
Authors and Affiliations
I. Rudyk
Keywords
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