Cognitive Organization of a Lexical Derivational Family of Words as a Basis for Creating an Electronic Database

The aim of the research is to construct a fragment of the cognitive model of the Russian national language. The fragment is based on the frame representation of Russian lexical derivational families of words and the processing of the relevant somatic information encoded in the basic and derivative lexis of this language. The material of the research is lexical derivational families formed from somatisms (words naming body parts). The authors analyzed literary, colloquial, dialect words and units of stylistically marked layers of vocabulary (e.g., slang). The choice can be explained by the fact that the analysis of not only literary, but also colloquial and dialect words demonstrates the universality of the language's deep structures, regardless of its speakers' place of residence and the sphere of language use. These deep structures are the basis of the derived units of the language. The main methodological approach was frame modeling of the lexical derivational families of words. While constructing a frame model of the lexical derivational family of words, such terms as frame, subframe, slot, propositional scheme and proposition were used. The meta-language of lexical derivational families' description is oriented to be used in the electronic database "Somatic Lexis of the Russian Language and Its Dialects", which is designed to automatically search for somatic derivatives by various kinds of requests. An analysis of derivational language units reveals the types of knowledge people refer to while forming a new word. Native speakers unite derivatives organizing a concept into groups by virtue of categorization principles. The concept is represented in the language as the basic word. The knowledge put in the derivatives reveals the way native speakers transfer the main features of the basic word to the objects of the surrounding reality and name them by means of this word. Thus, the lexical derivational family of words is considered as a fragment of the concept fixed in the language at the derivational level. The original method of frame modeling of lexical derivational families of words proposed in this article is aimed at an explicit demonstration of derivatives' semantics at different levels of abstraction: the deep level (propositional schemes and propositions) and the superficial level (lexical and derivational meaning of the derivative). It is shown that the structures of the deep level have a typed character. When completed, the database "Somatic Lexis of the Russian Language and Its Dialects" is supposed to be a resource which represents families of words as structures (1) containing structured language information and (2) objectifying data which exemplify the Russian linguistic view of the world. Moreover, the language material in the electronic database will help to (3) determine the kind of information contained in the derivatives that is the most important for native speakers, (4) discover the common and distinctive features of different families of words at different levels of the frame model, (5) identify the derivational potential of each family of words, (6) predict the structural and semantic development of families of words.

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