Corpus-based Investigation of the Representative Lexemes of the KIDNAPPING Idealized Cognitive Model in American News Discourse

• Main Author: Irina N. Bolushevskaya
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Sourthern Federal University 2018-09-01
• Series: Izvestiâ Ûžnogo Federalʹnogo Universiteta: Filologičeskie Nauki
• Subjects: scenario; corpus; ICM; conceptualization; image scheme
• Online Access: http://philol-journal.sfedu.ru/index.php/sfuphilol/article/view/1185
• ISSN: 1995-0640; 2312-1343

The article is devoted to the study of the linguistic representation of the idealized cognitive model KIDNAPPING in the corpus of American newspaper texts and the modeling of the scenario ICM on the basis of the obtained data. To study the lexical units objectifying the KIDNAPPING ICM in the American news discourse, we implied a corpus of newspaper texts in the volume of 114 million words of the general corpus of American English Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) containing texts from 1990 to 2017. The enclosure used contains texts from different sections of newspapers, but we only took into account examples marked NEWS. First we looked at the essential components of the KIDNAPPING scenario, which are the kidnapper and the victim. Further, who is the kidnapper most often, having analyzed the nouns that follow all lexeme lemmas of the kidnap and its synonyms with the preposition by, as well as the lexical units preceding the synonyms of the kidnap lexeme. Then we looked at the lexical units that surround the tokens of kidnap, abduct, hijack. Based on the received data, the remaining components of the ontology of the KIDNAPPING scenario, such as the motive and outcome, have been modeled. The results of the study are presented in the article.