“Intelligentsia” versus “Intellectuals” in the British English linguo-cultural community (a corpus-based study of the concepts)

Abstract

The paper focuses on the correlation between the concepts “Intelligentsia” and “Intellectuals” for the British English linguo-cultural community. It presents the background on the subject from different angles of study, how the correlation between the concepts is viewed by philosophers, historians, sociologists. The purpose of the study is to research how the correlation between the two concepts is reflected in the language, by analyzing the component structures of the lexical meanings of the synonymous lexemes that name the concepts, using the method of componential analysis. The study results show that this reflection can also be viewed by investigating the contexts from the British National Corpus, by means of contrasting the sets of prepositional attributive collocates for the lexemes “Intelligentsia” and “Intellectuals”. The findings of the conducted corpus-based research reveal a tendency to specialized use of attributive collocates for the lexemes under study.