Representation of identity in English, German, Russian and Chechen idioms: A corpus approach

Abstract

The article examines identity in English, German, Russian and Chechen idioms, as well as contexts of their use, obtained from the British National Corpus, the Corpus of Contemporary American Language, the Corpus of the German Language Institute in Mannheim, the National Corpus of the Russian Language, as well as from the Corpus of the Chechen language and in the course of a psycholinguistic survey of Chechen speakers. In its inner form and meaning, sociocultural factors affecting the formation of identity are revealed. The contexts reveal new or additional meanings of idioms not reflected in dictionaries, the place and perception of identity through the prism of cultures and social experience. A comparative, semantic analysis of idioms showed that identity has different kinds: personal, civil, political, regional.