CORPUS TECHNOLOGIES FOR STUDYING RUSSIAN LINGUISTIC CULTURE IN THE ASPECT OF RFL

Abstract

Learning about a linguoculture is a prerequisite for successfully acquiring a second or foreign language, or developing a personality profile by means of this language that will enable the speaker to communicate effectively and efficiently in different cultures. Such learning has always been based on authentic texts demonstrating the particular features of the mentality and the linguistic world view that the native speakers of a language have. The author believes that of the greatest linguistic and methodological values in this respect are narratives included in the Russian National Corpus (RNC). The relevance of the article lies in clarifying the linguistic principles of working with corpus data presented in RNC. The purpose of the article is to demonstrate the opportunities that RNC provides to those studying Russian linguoculture and to describe corpus tools that help to determine the paradigmatic and syntagmatic properties of Russian words that are culture-loaded. This set of vocabulary includes culture-specific words, words common for all Slavic cultures and culturally significant for Russians, and toponyms. Their key feature is that they are associated with cultural values. The language material used in the research is studied by means of corpus and contextual analysis. Also, elements of the statistical method are used when identifying word frequencies. The major result of the research is a description of the procedure for working with linguocultural vocabulary using RNC. It involves simple search queries as well as lexical and grammatical search by particular parameters clarifying semantic and grammatical features. This procedure allows for determining the contextualization conditions for the words that define the “image” of Russian linguoculture in the minds of both foreigners and native speakers of the Russian language. Such conditions include the occurrence chronology, a wide range of synonyms, occasional use of existing word-formation models, and “coding” culture-loaded meanings by different groups of lexical units.