On Conceptual and Axiological Aspects of the Word Mutter ʻMotherʼ in Context (Based on Corpus Material)

Abstract

Abstract This paper focuses on a linguistic image of mother in German languages. It seeks to grasp it through a typical context of the German word Mutter ʻmotherʼ. The research is based on results of distributional and thematic analyses of these words. These analyses are used as a base for reconstructing prototypical characteristics of “mother” and the related concepts used by speakers of German. The paper develops these findings into compiling the most frequent collocations and other (mostly contextual) information gathered by the use of corpus tools. The paper concludes with an outline of unconscious axiological processes used in evaluating the image of mother on the good/bad axis.