Combining corpus linguistics methods and experimental psycholinguistics in the terminology study

Abstract

One of the main objectives of Terminology is the compilation of effective databases for the successful representation and transmission of specialized knowledge. Therefore, it is necessary to bring the organization of such resources as close to the human mental lexicon structure as possible and to delve into conceptualization. Although the text-based studies of the process of conceptualization are effective, they have certain limitations. Recent neuro-linguistic and psycholinguistic studies highlight the existence of embodied cognition and situational cognition or conceptualization. Texts are created with a specific communication strategy and must follow certain language specific rules. Alongside the human ability to pursue a specific goal and to act consciously, fundamental automatic mechanisms (semantic priming) which also participate in the conceptualization of the reality, operate in the human mind and affect human behavior. The purpose of this study was to demonstrate the compatibility of the corpus linguistics approach and experimental psycholinguistic methods and to prove the prototypical naturalness of the results obtained in different languages. Multilingual data speaks for their universality and prototypicality at the terminological level. This makes it possible to obtain more accurate data about the human conceptual system. The data obtained as a result of corpus analysis and associative Вопросы психолингвистики 4 (42) 2019 75 Коренева О. Комбинирование методов корпусной лингвистики... tests complement and validate each other providing more reliability. The present terminology study in Russian and Spanish combines the analysis of the corpus and psycholinguistic methods. Some environmental concepts were analyzed in a bilingual corpus to establish the basic concepts and the relationships between the concepts typical for a given specific field of knowledge. The taken approach was used to reconstruct a complete universal frame that does not depend on a specific language. The results were compared with the data of the associative test with Russian and Spanish native speakers and with the results of the lexical decision with Spanish native speakers. The main objective of the study was to demonstrate the effectiveness of the multidisciplinary approach and the need to combine corpus analysis and psycholinguistic methods to study structures and the representation of specialized knowledge.