Studying the evolution of the linguoculturological concept BALANCE based on the universal and culture-specific collocations frequency analysis with the “balance” component in Russian and Anglo-American discourse

Abstract

The subject of the research is the polysemantic borrowed noun «баланс» (balance) in Russian and “balance” in the Anglo-American language. The aim of the research is to identify the significant universal and culture-specific collocations with the “balance” component, as well as to determine the structure of the concept represented by this lexeme in Russian and Anglo-American discourse. The statistical and psychological methods for analysing collocations in text corpora have been considered. The research is focused on adjective collocations with the “balance” component, formed according to the scheme ADJ (adjective) + NOUN, detected by statistical methods that calculate the frequency and mutual information (relevance) of shared use in dictionaries and linguistic corpora of Russian and Anglo-American texts in the time ranges (1820-1900) and (2015-2019). Within the framework of the psychological approach, the notions of semantic prosody and lexical priming have been considered. From the perspective of the psychological approach, it can be argued that the lexical unit «баланс» / “balance” in Russian and Anglo-American discourse in most cases is used with positive collocates and is associated with positive prosody. The scientific novelty of the research lies in identifying the significant universal and culture-specific collocations with the “balance” component, as well as in studying the evolution of the segmental concept БАЛАНС/BALANCE in Russian and Anglo-American discourse based on the frequency approach using contrastive, diachronic and etymological analysis. The research findings demonstrated the difference in the structure of the concept BALANCE in the time ranges (1820-1900) and (2015-2019) in the Russian language.