Conceptual Modeling as a Methodological Basis for the Analysis of Corpus Data

The aim of the article is to propose a new methodology for analyzing corpus data representing poetic discourse. The work is based on the material of the Poetic Subcorpus of the Russian National Corpus. The corpus of Russian poetry is used for selection of texts with the aim of their subsequent conceptual analysis. As a methodological formula for the analysis of corpus data, the author employs the structure of an artistic concept. An artistic concept is understood as a mental unit of an author's consciousness, which embodies his/her individual and culturally-based notions about objects of the poetic world. Being viewed as a model, it has a layered structure including a figural layer containing images of objects (mental pictures) as well as some other layers or components, such as. (1) conceptual (providing logical interpretation of the poetic reality); (2) image-bearing-associative (reflecting the connection between objects in the poetic world of an author's consciousness); (3) symbolic (placing the relationships between concepts of abstract and concrete nominations); (4) evaluative (giving a valuation of a depicted phenomenon and showing the connection with basic categories of an author's attitude to the world and national values). According to the author's vision, the concept is not only a unit of artistic consciousness (both individual and collective), but also a research construct, giving us a possibility to order the contexts of usage of linguistic units. In the article, the word sunset is studied as a representative of the corresponding concept and a poetic symbol connected with life, death and eternity. The author believes that the corpus is a convincing representation of poetic discourse and reflects the poetic norm of the era. Based on the complete selection of contexts with the word sunset from the corpus of poetry (over 3,000 units), the author shows the semantic structure of the cognominal concept and reveals that the poets of the Soviet era not only develop paradigms of figurative denomination of sunset, created by preceding writers, but also enrich the symbolic layer of the artistic concept. At the same time, the evaluative layer of the concept retains its ambivalence throughout the centuries of Russian poetry. Also, the author demonstrates that the corpus-based analysis of the literary text expands the range of answers to traditional questions of stylistic analysis concerning external text connections, understanding common poetic stereotypes, evolution of poetic images, etc. On the other hand, the use of conceptual analysis helps to structure the corpus data.

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