Investigation on author’s concept in the Russian National Corpus

Abstract

The data analysis of the Russian National Corpus (RNC) is being carried out by an increasing number of researchers, since the choice of lexical units and their description are now radically facilitated by corpus linguistics, which compiled all available texts in a particular database language based on a computer analysis and presented on the open Internet. The purpose of the study is to identify and describe the conceptual cognitive features and structural modeling of the CIVIC CONSCIOUSNESS concept in the works of Ye.A. Yevtushenko, i.e.: (1) based on the RNC data, to determine the place of the CIVIC CONSCIOUSNESS concept in the Russian social and artistic worldviews; (2) based on Yevtushenko’s works, to identify the features of the artistic CIVIC CONSCIOUSNESS concept in the individual author’s worldview; and (3) to characterize the interaction of the national and individual author’s worldviews in Yevtushenko’s works. To this end, the research involved general scientific methods of observation, description, and generalization as well as the method of conceptual analysis. The analysis of the RNC material shows that the structure of the CIVIC CONSCIOUSNESS concept is represented by five classes of features: (1) etymological and denotative motivating signs of the word representative of the concept; (2) conceptual attributes objectified as semantic word components; (3) figurative features; (4) categorical features; and (5) values (examples were taken from the main corpus of the Russian language as well as from the newspaper and poetic corpora). The analysis of the CIVIC CONSCIOUSNESS concept in Yevtushenko’s works suggests the anthropocentricity of its figurative component. Its content is revealed in terms of the Russian national worldview and, at the same time, the individual author’s worldview of Ye.A. Yevtushenko. As the analysis of ways of conceptualizing the CIVIC CONSCIOUSNESS concept has shown, the most actual characteristics in Yevtushenko’s worldview are conceptual figurative features, including: anthropomorphic, animate and inanimate ones. In addition, categorical (dimensional, qualitative, etc.) and value attributes of the CIVIC CONSCIOUSNESS concept were identified. The analysis of Yevtushenko’s literary texts made it possible to identify some occasional signs of the CIVIC CONSCIOUSNESS concept, in particular, a figurative sign of inanimate nature and a temporal attribute related to categorical features.