Authors’ name:
Kristina G. Golubeva, Anastasiya G. Alekseeva – Linguistics University of Nizhny Novgorod, Nizhny Novgorod, Russia
Abstract:
This article investigates the means by which the concept ‘Russian Alphabet’ is verbalized, drawing on a corpus of essays written by graduating high school students on the topic “My Favorite Letter of the Russian Alphabet” as part of the educational initiative “The History of the Letters of the Russian Alphabet,” organized in celebration of the Day of Slavic Literacy and Culture held in May – June 2025 at Nizhny Novgorod State Linguistics University. The concept under investigation is regarded as one of the key concepts of Russian culture that shape the national linguistic worldview. Employing a semantic-cognitive approach, the study identifies the lexical units that represent the concept and establishes a set of minimal contexts containing its nominations. The selected textual material is analyzed using the AntConc corpus analysis toolkit, making it possible to obtain data on the frequency and lexical collocability of the units constituting the nominative field of the concept under investigation. The study evaluates the informativeness and practical value of the data generated by each of the AntConc modules: Key Word in Context (KWIC), Plot, File View, Word Cloud, Cluster, N-Gram, Collocates, and Word List. The findings demonstrate the effectiveness of the toolkit in identifying genre-specific patterns, recurrent lexical patterns, and the lexical specification of abstract concepts. At the same time, the absence of lemmatization and morphological tagging is identified as a limitation of the software. Within the discourse of the analyzed corpus, the lexemes letter, alphabet, favorite, and my occupy a central position, confirming the subjective and personal nature of the participants’ reflections and pointing to emotionally charged and sacralized components of meaning in the semantic structure of the concept ‘Russian Alphabet.’
| Section | LANGUAGE AND CULTURE |
| DOI: | 10.47388/2072-3490/lunn2026-74-2-9-19 |
| Downloads | 8 |
| Key words | linguistics; cognitive linguistics; linguistic worldview; national concept; corpus manager |