Digital methods for linguistic and cross-cultural communication studies: Functioning of size adjectives in various fields of human activity

Abstract

© 2020 ACM. The paper analyzes functioning of contact size adjectives in such fields as clothes, footwear, jewelry, food, face features and human body in English and Tatar languages applying digital methods, including corpus linguistic methods. The material of research is taken from the national language corpora, i.e. British National Corpus (96,263,399) and Tatar National Corpus (26,000,000). The results show that in real life communication, English speakers occasionally describe necklaces by size adjectives while for the Tatar language speakers the length parameter does not matter, since in communication traditionally or stereotypically specified length of the necklace is presupposed. Parametric adjectives of the Tatar language rather describe the form of the necklace (kiñ/keçkenä). In both languages, positive size adjectives prevail four-or five-fold in outfit describing situation. In English, the frequency of these adjectives is two times as low. In both languages, negative size adjectives have the same frequency in describing clothes. In both languages, the size characteristic of shoes is extremely rare. It seems that there is no problem of discrepancies in shoe and foot sizes. Food is rarely characterized by size adjectives. In British National Corpus, the most common phrase is big mac. In Tatar adjective vak/small dominates when describing food parameters. In English phrases with human body, parameters also represent a large group. Phrases with the positive parameter adjective are distributed almost equally with respect to all parts of the face. British people are prone to a detailed description of the person's face. Additionally Tatar language speakers tend to appeal to complex adjectives to describe someone's appearance. It is clear that all the specified distinctive linguistic and cultural features that have come out due to modern digital linguistic methods should be taken into account in actual intercultural communication.