CONCRETENESS / ABSTRACTNESS RATINGS OF RUSSIAN AND ENGLISH NOUNS: CORPORA-BASED APPROACH

Abstract

The article reports on the experimental study aimed at rating 500 Top Frequent Russian Nouns as concrete / abstract by means of 5-polar scale among 500 respondents. Further comparison and contrasting with American English equivalents ratings of concreteness / abstractness revealed differences in perception accounting for 14% of all the words studied. The words with differences in concreteness / abstractness ratings in two languages were further studied when embedded in context. For the purposes of the research we chose Newspaper subcorpora of the Russian National Corpus and Corpus of Contemporary American English. The revealed peculiarities are due to cultural specifics of the languages in question.