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Pragmatically relevant factors are becoming more active in the process of wording the world. For the past few decades the most active hypostases turned out to be:

1)homo ludens – a playing person: e.g. couch potato, cacooner (a person who spends most of his time at home watching TV), mouse potato (a person who spends most of the time playing with the computer), cybersurfer, and

2)homo agens – acting person: e.g. do-it-yourselfer, do- it-your-selfism, all-at-once-ness (when many things are performed at the same time), life-boat ethics, hard-liner, bridge-builder, gut-lifer (tough advisory), etc.

Activisation of pragmatically relevant factors in the process of wording the world is manifested in the increased role of such parameters of wide pragmatic context as social, professional status of the speakers, age, ethnic identity and gender. Every social, professional, age, sex and ethnic group has their own CWV. On the one hand, one and the same object of reality will be categorised and verbalised differently by the representatives of the abovementioned groups. On the other hand, one and the same linguistic unit is perceived differently by the representatives of various groups. For example, the representatives

of the elder generation in the US would use ice-box and wireless in reference to refrigerator and radio, while the younger generation would use respectively fridge and boombox (Safire, 1986).

Another manifestation of the increased role of pragmatically relevant parameters is the emergence of the concept of “political correctness”. The abolishment of sexism in the English language resulted in the following: stewardess has been replaced by flight-attendant, house-wife – by homemaker, fisherman – by fisher, fireman – by firefighter. According to the parameters of age old person has been replaced by golden-ager and senior citizen and elderly person – by silver-ager. According to the professional parameter hairdresser has become hairologist, garbage collectors – sanitation engineer or sanitation personnel, prison has become a correctional facility and prison guard – correctional officer. The examples of politically-correct lexical units in the field of ethnic identity are well-known: Afro-American, AfroCaribbean, non-white, coloured.

The English cultural world view is continuing to evolve. To keep abreast of tomorrow’s world the teacher of English should be a word-watcher and should track down all the latest changes in the English cultural worldview.

By Vera Ivanovna Zabotkina

The development of linguistics lately has led to ‘an unexpected alliance’ of the two mainstream directions of studies – cognitive and corpus-based approaches. The term “cognitive corpus linguistics” (Arppe, et al, 2010: 2) was introduced to emphasise that statistical analysis based on corpus data can yield answers to questions about human cognition. It follows that, in dealing with frequency data, we learn not only about a language system, but also about the extralinguistic factors that trigger its functioning at a given point in time. Thus, according to R. Langacker, “an event becomes more and more deeply entrenched in our memory through continued repetition” (Langacker, 1987: 100). At the same time, a major argument by Noam Chomsky against the use of corpora data was that “frequency tells you about the world rather than about language (“I live in New York” is doubtless more frequent than “I live in Dayton, Ohio”)”. This criticism is justified in many respects. What people say or speak about is constrained by external circumstances or reflects the events that have had a strong impact on the current state of affairs. For example, the noun ‘debris’ (“all the pieces that are left after something has been destroyed in an accident”) which is not normally rated as a frequent word in present-day English, has suddenly soared in Google statistics to several

million uses in the last couple of months. The change in the word’s frequency understandably took place following the tragic search for the missing Malaysia jet.

What does frequency information tell us? Is it a clue to language phenomena or the outer world?

We proceed from the assumption that empirical data in the corpus evidence provides us with actual contexts of language use that serve as a source of gaining knowledge both about language and the world through observation and experience. In addition to the linguistic context, a corpus may contain extra-linguistic information (or meta-data) on such factors as the age or gender of the speaker/writer, text genre, temporal and spatial details about the origin of the text, etc. This extralinguistic information allows comparisons between different kinds of text or different groups of speakers.

Interestingly, a new discipline described as “corpus stylistics” has emerged to apply an inventory of corpus methodology to the study of literary texts. In her analysis of a corpus of texts by Charles Dickens against a corpus of nineteenth-century fiction, the British scholar Michaela Mahlberg suggests that “the repeated sequences of words can be interpreted as pointers to local textual functions” (Mahlberg, 2007: 1). A corpus-based analysis of speech clusters (groups of words that follow each

other in a text) provides both quantitative and qualitative information linking the co-occurrence patterns to particular characters and concepts. Sequences of words “expressing interaction between the characters (Speech clusters), describing looks and movements (Body Part clusters), creating textual worlds by comparison and contrast (As If clusters), or locating and relating actions in time and place (Time and Place clusters)” (op. cit, p. 18) can serve as an example of linguistic tools used to broaden the descriptive inventory of literary stylistics. Word clusters also function “to individualise characters” with regard to the social context, which can be revealed by corpus accounting “for specific linguistic forms on the textual surface” (op. cit, p. 27).

Speaking of social interaction with regard to people’s professions, we may consider discourse markers. According to the ICE-GB Grammar, the function of a discourse marker can be realised by such categories, as reaction signals (‘OK’, ‘Yes’, ‘Super’, ‘Definitely’, ‘Not at all’, ‘Sure’, etc.), formulaic expressions (‘I mean’, ‘you know’, ‘you see’, etc.), connectives (‘Well’, ‘to begin with’, ‘So’, ‘But’, ‘Now’, ‘Therefore’, etc.), and interjections (‘Uhm’, ‘Mm’, ‘Oh’, ‘Uh’ ,etc.). In different genres, however, alternative forms will be selected in the corpus to highlight behavioural strategies in making a conversation.

In the speech of lecturers mostly interjections are used expressing hesitation in informal discourse. There are also connectives, such as now, and, well, but anyway, and others.

A sample of rather informal usage is presented by a concordance of text units where the speaker is an interviewee. Repetitions of the anaphoric ‘And’ indicating additional information or turn taking in conversation can be seen as a prominent marker of the text category.

In a more formal variety (speaker role – chairman), we can see that fewer interjections appear in the concordance. The interaction tends to be more restrained as the speaker is trying to be in control of the situation. The prevailing discourse markers in this category are formulaic expressions (‘I mean’, ‘Good evening’, ‘Goodbye now’, ‘Thank you very much’, ‘Sorry’), reaction signals (‘OK’, ‘Good’, ‘Quite’, ‘Right’), and connectives.

The speaker role judge is as far removed as possible from informal varieties (for example, that of interviewee). Here we observe more instances of formulaic expressions (‘I beg your pardon’, ‘Thank you very much’, ‘I’m sorry’, ‘Please’) and reaction signals (‘very well’, ‘OK’, ‘all right’, ‘indeed’), but a minimal use of interjections.

This goes to show that frequency counts are often suggestive of socio-linguistic patterns and give a clue to understanding people’s behavior in a variety of situation settings.

Finally, we may have a look at how browsing a representative corpus such as the Russian National Corpus may provide the missing links in a hierarchy of information in translation studies. Corpora enable us to observe

FOCUS ON LANGUAGE English

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a word or a phrase in its natural environment and determine the specificity and frequency of the phenomenon in the target language. The ‘translation profile’ of lexical units, i.e. the contexts cited in the corpus, will amplify our knowledge not only of the word’s semantics but also of pragmatics of its use, which goes beyond the limits of even most comprehensive dictionaries. Thus, for instance, the phrase “Молодые стояли, как барашки” in the translation of “The Twelve Chairs” by I. Ilf and E. Petrov by John Richardson was rendered as “The young couple stood in awe”. The corpus evidence con-

firms our assumption that the connotations of the words ‘барашек’ and its direct translation equivalent ‘lamb’ do not coincide in the two languages. The English word ‘lamb’ is used mostly as a symbol of purity, as a Biblical figure. When it is compared to characteristics of a person, ‘lamb’ connotes innocence, gentleness, or meekness. But the Russian word ‘барашек’ does not enjoy such characteristics because in the Russian culture Holy Lamb is known as Божий агнец. A lamb in Russia is known as a fearful and babyish animal. Moreover, the full form баран is a pejorative item which stands for a dumb, sluggish person with a facile disposition. But in our context it is used in a more gentle way and conveys the meaning of a timorous and obedient couple. The given translation seems to be the optimal one because it reveals the actual nuance of meaning of the Russian expression. There are numerous contexts in the corpus that certify a more direct correlation – “lambs” – “овечки”, in which case no stylistic (associative) gap is observed.

In conclusion it can be pointed out that although corpus linguistics is not directly concerned with psychological concepts or prototypes, the relation between microlinguistic events and macro-social and conceptual structures may facilitate access to extra-linguistic information contained in the data, including language change.

References

Arppe, Antti; Gaëtanelle, Gilquin; Glynn, Dylan; Hilpert, Martin; Zeschel, Arne. Cognitive Corpus Linguistics: five points of debate an current theory and methodology//Corpora. – Edinburgh University Press, Vol. 5, Issue 1, 2010

Chomsky, Noam. Language and Thought. Mayer Bell Limited, 1993

Langacker, R.W. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar.

Vol. 1. Theoretical Prerequisites, Stanford, 1987 Mahlberg M. Clusters, key clusters and local textual

functions in Dickens//Corpora. – Edinburgh University Press, vol. 2, Issue 1, 2007

Natalia Gvishiani