Frame model and prototypical meanings of the category "unwise act" (in the Russian language)

The aim of this paper is to show how the frame model of acts is represented in the system of the Russian language, discourse and word associations. The semantic group "unwise act" is taken as an example. The research objectives are to determine the components and its prototypical characteristics of the frame of the group "unwise act", to analyze which of the components are expressed more than the others in the system of the language, discourse and associations. The sources of the material are dictionaries of the Russian language including the dictionary of synonyms, the ideographic dictionary, the association dictionary; the texts of the Russian National Corpus (13,718 texts; 26 words of different parts of speech that represent the group "unwise act"). To reach the objectives, the following methods are applied: the analysis of the semantics of the words; the analysis of word combinations, synonymous and derivational links, associative data. The research is based on the current cognitive approach, according to which people learn about the world through categorization, which is a process in which ideas and objects are recognized, differentiated, and thus understood. The categories in a language are arranged with the help of structures with prototypical and peripheral elements. A prototype is viewed in the paper as an object that can be defined as a unity of elements with the features which are associated with a certain category. In other words, it is the most central member of a category. A frame is considered to be one of the means of structuring knowledge and experiences. By means of vocabulary research, words, which denote the situation of an unwise act, are identified. These words are thoroughly analyzed in terms of their semantic peculiarities, which helps to design a model of the situation the words represent. As part of the study, the peculiarities of their functioning in the Russian discourse and their associative links are investigated. The analysis of the dictionary data helps to build a frame and determine its basic elements: "aim", "act", "subject", "assessment", "result". 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 of the group "unwise act" more exact. Comparison of the dictionary, discourse and associative data helps to find out the most and least important elements within the frame.

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