The mental consideration of resilience as a relevant social concept (a corpus-based research of American English)

Abstract

Abstract The article is dedicated to researching resilience as a relevant social concept. It puts forward a new idea to study the actual mental consideration of social and political phenomena via purely linguistic tools. As a research methodology, a new approach is offered. In particular, the authors extrapolate Zhabotynska’s semantics of lingual networks onto Popova and Sternin’s semantic-cognitive analysis. The study is conducted through corpus technologies: a COCA sample of discourse contexts with the resilience lexeme is used to reconstruct a conceptual model of the resilience concept (denotative meaning). Subsequently, this meaning is processed via two cognitive operations: cognitive interpretation and prominence. Finally, the field cognitive model of resilience is obtained. Sorted by frequency in the corpus sample as core and periphery zones, the separate cognitive features indicate what is more or less important for Americans in the current consideration of resilience as a social and political phenomenon. Each research stage is explained and discussed by the authors in detail.