Application of Corpus Technologies in Conceptual
Studies (based on the Concept Ukraine Actualization in
English and Ukrainian Political Media Discourse)
Nataliia Romanyshyn1[0000-0001-5918-5423]
1
Lviv Politechnic National University, Lviv, S. Bandera Str., 12, Ukraine
nataliya.romanyshyn@gmail.com
Abstract. The article is dedicated to the study of concept Ukraine actualization
in modern Ukrainian and English political media discourse. It is aimed at the
revealing semantic-cognitive peculiarities of language means that verbalize
concept’s notional, evaluative and imagery-associative content. The purpose of
the article is to expose heuristic potential and practical efficiency of corpus and
concordance technologies application in conceptual studies. The analysis of the
discussed concept was performed on the basis of created textual corpus that in-
cludes 412 texts. In the research we apply concordance technology for the crea-
tion of concept’s nominative field by analyzing the lexical means of direct and
indirect concept nominations, their coreferents and associates frequency and
distribution. To create the evaluative level of the concept the attention was paid
to the frequency and distribution of lexemes with evaluative and emotional
meaning. To analyze the conceptual metaphor as a basis of concept’s image
content modeling the corpus was metaphorically annotated. The corpus based
analysis of the frequency and distribution of the concept verbalizers, the analy-
sis of lexical semantics and pragmatics, the consideration of contextual content
of concept actualization allowed to develop the frame model of the concept in
both discourses and define common cognitive features of the concept Ukraine
in the discussed linguistic cultures.
Keywords: corpus linguistics, concept, cognitive modeling.
1 Introduction
The conceptual analysis as a main method of concept study both within the linguo-
cognitive and linguo-cultural science allows analyzing a concept as a complex notion,
an entity of the general conceptual model of the world. There are several approaches
and methodologies of conceptual analysis that include methods of:
─ semantic analysis: that consists in interpretation of the most frequent lexical means
of concept verbalization and their combination; the cognitive features that form
concept’s content correspond to the semes of concept’s nominative field constitu-
ents and are revealed in the result of semantic analysis and on the basis of cogni-
tive interpretations of their lingual associates reflecting all stereotyped knowledge,
Copyright © 2020 for this paper by its authors.
Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
believes, assumptions, values profiling the corresponding phenomenon in the de-
scribed language culture; the analysis of the dictionary definitions is also an insep-
arable instrument of concept studies since the lexical system represented in the lex-
icographic sources reflects the lingual-conceptual system of the world;
─ cognitively oriented methods of concept modeling and reconstruction of conceptu-
al correlations carried out by defining the complete conceptual field and logical-
semantic relations between its components usually in the form of frames as a for-
malized description of human verbal activity (texts) in the context of situations;
─ experimental methods – with psycholinguistics experiment as the most predicative;
─ statistical methods for analyzing concepts verbalizers distribution in their textual
realization [11; 13, p.68; 14; 17; 18, p. 58-71].
However in modern conceptual studies there observed the tendency towards inte-
grated comprehensive methodology based on both the application of qualitative and
quantitative tools enabling the processing of large textual material with aim of obtain-
ing most objective results [16; 10; 15, p.43-54; 20] by covering the largest possible
number of concept expression contexts either in the whole corpus of national lan-
guage or in intentionally created ones with the purpose of profiling the concept from
specific thematic or discursive perspectives. Thus, the corpus technologies in concep-
tual studies have become the most productive way of conceptual information obtain-
ing and interpreting.
In this paper we aim to reveal the efficiency of corpus based technology in concep-
tual study and the application of corpus methods for the defining concept UKRAINE
nominative field structure and frame modeling of concept’s content fields (notional,
evaluative and imagery) in modern English and Ukrainian political discourse.
2 The Notion of Text Corpora
Corpus linguistics is a relatively recent method in linguistics. Scholars argue on the
definition and typology of corpora. As a rule a corpus is a large computerized collec-
tion of texts ranging from, say, 100,000 words to trillions of words containing natural-
ly occurring language and should be representative of a language or language variety.
It is most often annotated in some form, for example part-of-speech tagging or some
other type of markup. The typology of corpora include the following: general corpora,
aiming to reflect a language in its entirety, specialized corpora tailored to a specific
variety of the language, dynamic corpora, which are updated regularly, learner corpo-
ra, comparable corpora, multimodal corpora, containing not only transcriptions of
speech but also records of nonverbal behavior [1; 2; 8; 9]. Computer technology has
since facilitated the creation of diverse linguistic corpora. Corpora, thus, allow ad-
dressing the variety of research questions and have been applied in a wide range of
linguistic disciplines, including lexicography, grammar, discourse analysis, sociolin-
guistics, language teaching, literary studies, translation studies, forensics, pragmatics,
cognitive linguistics, conceptual studies, etc.
3 Creation of the Research Corpus
For the purpose of the research two text corpora were created – English and Ukrainian
– that included 400 open access sources texts excreted from 2014-2017 English and
Ukrainian political media discourse. The process encompassed the following stages:
data input, conversion and grapheme analysis, annotation, transfer of the annotated
text to the corpora and providing access to them. The basic principle of corpora com-
pilation for the analysis of concept Ukraine actualization in modern English and
Ukrainian political media discourse was the theory of media information distribution.
The selected texts were also chronologically marked.
Further work was performed by application of corpus managers, in our case
Ant.Conc 3.2.4w as a search system of statistical information retrieval. The heuristic
function of concordance enables the insight into the semantics and pragmatics of the
text due to the possibility of words connotations analysis in the large number of con-
texts, it allows to trace syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations of textual elements and
assess them from quantitative and qualitative perspective.
4 Results of Corpus Technologies Application for the Analysis
of Concept Ukraine Cognitive Content
In “textual space” concepts enter into semantic relations that create conceptual or
associative verbal network of the text. The knots of this network are the dominating
concepts-constituents which correlations create and influence the semantic develop-
ment of the text.
4.1 Cognitive-semantic Parameters of the Concept
The study of cognitive-semantic aspects of the concept textual realization is preceded
by the definition of its nominative field. Explicit lexical verbalizers of the concept
Ukraine are lexemes Ukraine and its coreferents that represent the concept in their
unity or on the basis of metonymic transference: The EU should not fall into the trap
of offering more financial concessions to Kiev, this will only delay the necessary hard
choices that need to be made by Ukraine (see Fig. 1,2); implicit ones are the expres-
sions that describe a corresponding situation of reality by qualitative characteristics
defined by interpretations and inferences: It would see Europe embrace the former
Soviet Republic and move the country out from the overbearing shadow of neighbor-
ing Russia, currently its largest trading partner.
Fig. 1. The context of explicit concept Ukraine lexical verbalizers in Ukrainian political media
discourse
Fig. 2. The context of explicit concept Ukraine lexical verbalizers in English political media
discourse
The application of concordance programs makes it possible to define on the basis of
lexical frequency the main lexico-semantic fields and their correlation within the cor-
responding texts. The data obtained in the result of lexemes frequency analysis and
lexico-semantic fields definition enabled us to determine the character of contextual
environment of concept Ukraine verbalizers-referents both in English and Ukrainian
political media discourse, since the concept can be explicable in correlations of its
lexical representations and within the context of background knowledge. In modern
conceptology the analysis of lexical elements compatibility is one of the most produc-
tive ways of conceptual analysis. The analysis of lexical frequency combined with
lexico-semantic analysis and contextual analysis enables the identification of explicit
and implicit notional-evaluative senses embodied in different language forms of dis-
course. It also allows for elucidating the dynamics of concept chronological changes.
The formation of conceptual features manifests itself in the “behaviour” of the lex-
eme, in particular in its combination and distribution. The more frequently the words
and expressions that actualize a definite conceptual feature occur together the more
proximate are these features to the nucleus of the concept structure. Moreover the
analysis of lexical elements combinability frequency contributes to the determination
of the conceptual structure and finding out new features of conceptualization.
Thus, the analysis of the concept Ukraine discourse verbalization specificity both
in Ukrainian and English political media discourse conducted by application of
Ant.Conc 3.2.4w and the above described procedures led to the conclusions about
direct and indirect verbalizers, their lexical, semantic, grammatical parameters and
lexico-stylistic characteristics.
Українські Українці
7% 7% Україна
59%
Українська
7%
Українсь
кий
20%
Fig. 3. The frequency of concept direct nominations in Ukrainian discourse
Ukrainians
3%
Ukrainian
35%
Ukraine
62%
Fig. 4. The frequency of concept direct nominations in English discourse
The most frequent ways of concept nomination are nouns and adjectives Ukraine,
Ukrainian the following diagrams (see Fig. 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8) reflect the frequency of
metonymic concept coreferents and coreferents-associates in the processed texts.
Генпрокура
тура Уряд
1% 13% Київ
Опозиція 19%
4%
Партія
12%
Донбас
16%
Парламент
10% "ДНР"
7%
Донецьк
Крим
16% 2%
Fig. 5. Concept metonymic coreferents frequency in Ukrainian discourse
Opposition Party Court Kiev
Authorities 6% 3% 3% 30%
6%
Town
7%
Police
8%
Parliament
7% other 36%
Fig. 6. Concept metonymic coreferents frequency in English discourse
Віктор Дональд Ангела
Олександр
Янукович Трамп Меркель Юлія
Захарченко
10% 11% 4% Тимошенко Юрій
2% 1%
Луценко
Володимир
4%
Гройсман
Віктор
3% Арсеній
Володимир Ющенко
Яценюк
Путін 2%
2%
17%
Міхеїл
Петро
Сакашвілі
Порошенко Барак Обама Рінат Ахметов
9% Надія
20% 3% 2%
Савченко
10%
Fig. 7. Frequency of concept coreferent-associates in Ukrainian political media discourse
Merkel Tymoshenk Savchenko
4% Obama o 4% Putin
7% 36%
6%
Yanukovych
9%
Trump
16% Poroshenko
18%
Fig. 8. Frequency of concept coreferent-associates in English political media discourse
The analysis of frequency data and distribution of lexical units enables to determine
the dominant lexico-semantic groups that constitute the contextual background of the
realization of direct and indirect metonymic coreferents of the concept verbalization.
The determined groups we treat as corresponding domains of the concept actualiza-
tion: in Ukrainian discourse – economy, Ukraine-EU, diplomacy, sanctions against
Russia, annexation of Crimea, Revolution of Honour, War on Donbass, terrorism (in
dissenting order); in English discourse – Maidan Revolution, diplomacy, terrorism,
war in Donbass, economу, annexation of Crimea, Ukraine-EU (in dissenting order)
(see Fig. 9, 10).
Революці анексія дипломат
я Гідності Криму ія
3% 8% 28%
економік
а
10%
війна на санкції Україна-
Донбасі проти ЄС
30% Росії тероризм 15%
3% 3%
Fig. 9. General distribution of lexical elements belonging to semantic domains in Ukrainian
political media discourse
Diplomacy Ukraine-EU War in
34% 6% Donbass
36%
Annexation
of Crimea Maidan
Economic Terrorism
5% Revolution
6% 9% 4%
Fig. 10. General distribution of lexical elements belonging to semantic domains in English
political media discourse
A special attention has been paid to the frequency and distribution of lexemes with
evaluative and emotional meanings defined on the basis of seme-componentional
analysis: adjectives – окупований, складний, поранений, проблемний, критичний,
ворожий/ weak, fragmented, peaceful, heavy, wounded, injured, worst, concerned,
dangerous, broken; nouns – допомога, окупація, протест, вторгнення,
сепаратисти, заручники, ворог, анексія,агресія, атака, насильство,
миротворці/ riot, protests, peace, rebels, crisis, conflict, aggression, pressure, dead,
disaster, victims; verbs – боротися, допомагати, захищати, підтримувати,
стріляти, воювати/threaten, oppress, kill, fire, blame, combat, mortar, protest,
defend, protect, help.
1. Baroness Ashton, the EU’s foreign policy chief, had travelled to Kiev to try to
forge a diplomatic solution to the three-week long crisis, which erupted when Mr
Yanukovych abruptly pulled out of a deal promising closer trade and political ties
with the EU. Instead, he said he would pursue links with Moscow, angering many
Ukrainians who envisage a more prosperous future with the EU.
2. Українці вже стали заручниками популістів, які за 25 років створили таку
структуру українського суспільства, яка унеможливлює стійке і динамічне
економічне зростання і генерує попит на популізм.
3. Нині ми маємо трохи інші умови, ніж у 2013 році. А ще багато хто
розчарований «результатами» революції. У декого є банальний страх, що
буде тільки гірше. Усі ці речі поки блокують можливість соціального вибуху.
Стримує також війна на сході країни. Однак негатив накопичуватиметься.
Не треба забувати про прийняті парламентом зміни, які називають
реформами... Саме це й може спричинити масштабні протести», - пояснює
експерт.
The frequency of lexeme with axiological semantics demonstrates the considerable
prevalence of negative verbalizers. The defined lexical units display the axiological
parameters of the defined conceptual domains (such as political/economic stabil-
ity/instability; maturity/immaturity; intrusion of power in to the processes of democ-
racy; welfare, corruption, etc.) that specify and complicate the structure of corre-
sponding domains, ascribing them additional characteristics and features.
4.2 Imagery and Axiological Parameters of the Concept
In the scope of cognitive linguistics cognitive metaphor is considered one of the as-
pects of conceptualization which is defined not only as a language phenomenon but as
instrument of cognition, information processing and reflection of reality and
knowledge structuring [19]. The theory of conceptual metaphor operates with the no-
tions of “conceptual referent” (target mental sphere, denotative zone, target domain,
the direction of metaphoric expansion) construed as a denotative substance identified
by metaphor; and conceptual correlate (source mental sphere, donor sphere, source
domain, source of metaphoric expansion) understood as a concept engaged in the
comparison. The ground of metaphor is the correlation between the referent and cor-
relate that contain a certain aspect, features as a basis for comparison, general charac-
teristic. In this respect the context plays a decisive role in identification of the aspect
of metaphorization [7].
The metaphoric model is determined on the basis of semantic analysis of the set of
language means that, represent a certain conceptual sphere and create typical tradi-
tional taxonomic clusters united by one notion, for example the model of war, mecha-
nism, body, theatre, medicine, etc. [12,p.79]. the metaphoric model is open, capable of
developing and engaging different new components that enrich and complicate the
metaphoric image.
The concept Ukraine is a dynamic mental entity constructed in the process of in-
terrelation of subjects of modern Ukrainian and English political media discourse in
the result of embodiment of notional-evaluative content in the names of referents that
represent Ukraine metaphorically. To analyze metaphoric actualization of the concept
in the discourse the corpus technologies have also been applied.
For this purpose the corpus annotation was performed with the aim of metaphors
search facilitation. The process of corpus annotation was the following:
manual search of metaphors and ascribing a corresponding category;
usage of tags