MODELING OF THE PROTOTYPE STRUCTURE OF THE CONCEPT OF SUCCESS: CORPUS-BASED STUDIES
Keywords:
lexical-semantic field, concept, linguoculturology, structure of concept, concept of SUCCESS, corpus linguistics, Corpus of American Commencement Speeches, commencement speechAbstract
The research is devoted to the topical issues of modern linguistics, namely lexicology and lexico-semantic fields. The article considers the construction, comparison and identity of the lexico-semantic field and the concept as a conceptual term of linguoculturology. Within the framework of the research we define the concept as a complex culturally determined multi-substrate mental construction. The research is also relevant to the corpus linguistics as a linguistic method.
One of the topical issues nowadays is the study of the American language picture of the world, especially national perceptions of success, achievement of set goals and realization of dreams, verbalized in the concept of SUCCESS. In the study of the concept on the basis of lexicographic sources it is possible to reconstruct its conceptual substrate, which is the minimum of the concept meaningful scope. The structure of the concept created on the basis of these data may be misleading and not accurate in relation to the structure of the American concept of SUCCESS. The concept is an associative phenomenon and reflects the specificity of the ethno-cultural perception of a particular fragment of the world. Lexemes are recorded in defining and translation dictionaries, while their associative units are almost invariably not. The perceptual structure is a superstructure in the form of a certain «halo», which is difficult to convey in words, but can be established with the help of corpus research.
In the research, the created structure of the lexical-semantic field SUCCESS is compared with the modeled prototype structure of the American concept of SUCCESS. To compare quantitative and qualitative values of both structures we use corpus linguistics method. To achieve the goal of the research we used a specially created Corpus of American Commencement Speeches – CACS (2000-2021), which contains 100 commencement speeches from 2000–2021. AntConc 3.5.9 Corpus Manager was used to work with the CACS.
