What Can Science, Religion, Politics, Culture and the Economy Do? A Corpus Study of Metonymical Conceptualization Combined with Personification

ABSTRACT The study analyses occurrences of Russian nouns meaning ‘science’, ‘religion’, ‘economy’, ‘politics’ and ‘culture’ as human-like subjects. This kind of use is interpreted as an example of a conceptualization described as Personification-With-Metonymy. On the basis of the fact that Russian examples work well in translation into other languages, we assume that similar conceptualization of these abstract nouns is not completely language-dependent. The study is based on the analysis of examples taken from Integrum, a large non-annotated Russian corpus. The large number of examples found in newspaper texts and documented both quantitatively and qualitatively suggests that such non-annotated corpora can be used for studying conceptualization.