Discourse Analysis of the Semiotic Field of the Concept FAMILY: A Comparative Study of the Chinese and English Parallel Corpora (In Eng.)

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of the semiotic field of the concept FAMILY in the English and Chinese languages through the application of the methodology of critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics. The article is based on the materials of the Chinese English Learners Corpus (CELC) and the combined materials of the BROWN and the written British National Corpus (BNC) for studying the vocabulary co-occurrence of the node word “family” from the point of view of collocation, colligation, semantic preference, and semantic prosody. The differences between Chinese and Western family cultures are revealed from the perspective of critical discourse analysis and the use of a horizontal combination of vocabulary relevant to the semiotic field of family. The study exemplifies the significant differences between Chinese learners and English native speakers in the choice and the use of core collocations in the minimal context of the family-related vocabulary. The conducted examination of the use of the node word “family” and its collocations in the Chinese English Learners Corpus compared to the combined English native speakers corpus in terms of semantic preference and semantic prosody demonstrates the most significant differences in understanding of the related concept as observed through the most common collocations. The article demonstrates the efficiency of the critical discourse analysis use in combination with the methods of corpus linguistics for the purpose of validation and verification of the conclusions regarding the content of the semiotic fields, as exemplified on the basis of the semiotic field of the concept FAMILY. Future research developments are seen in the possible extension of the corpus material base, including the materials on a wide variety of languages, for the purpose of further comparative analysis.