COGNITIVE CRITERIA FOR TEXT ENTRY ARRANGEMENT IN RUSSIAN-LANGUAGE THREAT-CORPUS

Abstract

The study makes a case for purposely elaborated text entry arrangement criteria in THREAT-corpus. THREAT-corpus (Russian language, 10.4 m words) was built in 2018 to investigate “sociocultural challenges/threats” in fiction, non-fiction and internet news texts. Various types of sociocultural threats and challenges, spread around the Internet and literature, strongly influence modern culture and ideology. The aim of the study is to substantiate the approach to text entry arrangement in the corpus. For the purpose linguists analyzed the conceptual domain “sociocultural challenges/ threats” and built a frame of the domain. So, frame “sociocultural threats” was by design implemented as a cognitive foundation for the corpus. The set of methods used included conceptual analysis, framing, representative sampling, cognitive modeling. The methods applied made it possible to collect texts, detect and describe sociocultural threats in diverse types of discourse and, consequently, to analyze cognitive aspects of frame-based corpus elaboration. With the objective to optimise analytical processing, all text entries were grouped by the following criteria: 1) discursive characteristics and strategies; 2) types of threats represented; 3) types of cognitive mechanisms for text arrangement. The first criterion groups texts as representative samples of different types of discourse. The second criterion allows for categorizing texts by content. The third criterion creates a cognitive foundation for text entry arrangements. Combining corpus elaboration with linguistic frame analysis resulted in more precise configurations of cognitive models in the conceptual domain “sociocultural threats/challenges”. Word frequency for lexemes, manifesting sociocultural challenges appeared to be an important factor of conceptual structures representation.