The Frame Model of Dishonest Acts (In the Russian Language)

The aim of this article is to show how the frame model of acts, dishonest acts in particular, is represented in the system of the Russian language, discourse and word associations. The linguistic research objective includes defining the components and its prototypical characteristics of the frame of the group “dishonest act”, revealing more and less expressed components of the situation in the system of the Russian language, discourse and associations. The sources of the material are dictionaries of the Russian language including the dictionary of synonyms, the association dictionary; the texts of the Russian National Corpus. To achieve the aim, the following methods are applied: the analysis of words' semantics; the analysis of word combinations, the analysis of words' contextual meaning; the research of synonymous and derivational links, associative data. The research is based on the current cognitive approach, according to which people learn about the world with the help of categorisation, which is a process in which ideas and objects are recognised, classified and thus understood. The categories in a language are arranged with the help of the structures with prototypical and peripheral elements. A prototype is viewed in the article as an object that can be defined as a unity of elements with features which are associated with a certain category; it is the central element of a category. Acts are represented in the research as a semantic-cognitive category with dishonest acts as the subcategory of the category of acts. A supposition is made that the category of acts and its subcategories are based on the same frame model. A frame is considered to be one of the means of structuring knowledge and experiences. By means of vocabulary research, lexemes, which denote the situation of dishonest acts, are singled out. These words are thoroughly analysed in terms of their semantic peculiarities, which helps to build the model of the situation represented by these lexemes. This model consists of the following elements: “aim”, “action”, “subject”, “object”, “valuation”, “result”. As part of the study, the peculiarities of their functioning in the Russian discourse and the associative links are investigated. The discourse analysis specifies the core of the frame and the prototypical characteristics of its components. The study of the word associations makes the prototypical features of the frame more exact. Comparison of the dictionary, discourse and association data shows that some of these key elements are highlighted more than the others in the language and discourse, which actually shows from which perspective the frame is viewed.

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