Statistic methods in the study of a textual concept (with reference to the statement of Spain on the unilateral declaration of independence by Kosovo presented to the International Court of Justice)

The article explores the potential of statistical approaches for the retrieval of lexical representatives of a textual concept as well as for the study of their correlations with the ideological content of the text. Based on Michael Freeden's concept-oriented theory of ideology, the authors suggest to study the lexical representation of the concept "sovereignty" in the statements on the unilateral declaration of independence by Kosovo presented to the International Court of Justice, which implicitly reflect the ideological orientations of 37 countries as for the idea of sovereignty and its status in the international law. To do this, the authors calculate the frequency of both direct and indirect representatives of the concept within the statements made by 37 countries. This analysis shows that the frequency of words which can be regarded as potential representatives of the concept in question is three times higher in the texts of countries opposing Kosovo's independence than of those supporting it, this reveals the "argumentative potential" of the concept in the discussion on Kosovo's independence. The statement made by Spain, strongly opposed to the idea of the independence of Kosovo, has the highest number of words potentially representing the concept "sovereignty". The authors then proceed to the statistical analysis of collocations in Spain's statement which leads to retrieve the indirect representatives of the concept in question relevant for the particular text. These are: territorial integrity, political unity and independence (only nouns or combinations of nouns and adjectives were retained). Obviously, they correspond to the various aspects of sovereignty as defended by Spain. Besides these representatives, the authors analyze two statistically specific units: autonomy and border control. The authors show that the uniqueness of border control in the statement of Spain reflects the peripheral character of the corresponding meaning in the structure of the studied concept, while the qualitative analysis of autonomy reveals that it reflects the meaning opposing the idea of independence (autonomy is suggested as an alternative to independence) and cannot be considered as a representative of the concept "sovereignty" in this particular text. The authors conclude that the statistical methods and the techniques of automatic treatment of texts can be useful for the preliminary lexical and semantic analysis of political concepts as reflected in ideologically non-neutral texts.

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