PECULIARITIES OF THE REPRESENTATION OF THE LEXEMES “ENEMY” AND “VIETNAMESE” IN THE MEMORIES OF VIETNAM WAR PARTICIPANTS
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.32782/folium/2024.4.8Keywords:
representation, corpus analysis, corpora, concordance, frequency. context, lexemeAbstract
The article is dedicated to the investigation of the representation peculiarities of the words "enemy" and "Vietnamese" within the corpus of memoirs of participants of the Vietnam War. This particular matter is examined by identifying their distinctive features and representation in the text, as well as searching for common characteristics and similar patterns of their functioning. A self-made corpus of memoirs of participants in the Vietnam War serves as the material of this study. The corpus includes three texts written by retired U.S. military colonels: 1) "Death in the Imperial City: U.S. Marines in the Battle for Hue" by Colonel Richard Camp (2018), 2) "The Path to War: U.S. Marine Corps Operations in Southeast Asia" by Colonel George R. Hofmann Jr. (2014), and 3) "Ringed by Fire: Siege of Khe Sanh" by Lieutenant Colonel Leonard Blasiol (2019). The methodological foundation of this research is corpus analysis and a series of associated techniques, namely frequency analysis, concordance, and collocation. These techniques allow to assess the significance of a word in the text, its functioning in context and its interaction with other words within the text. After a step-by-step analysis of each aspect, the obtained results were compared to reveal interrelations between the chosen words. It was established that the words "enemy" and "Vietnamese" exhibit a high level of similarity in several aspects. First of all, their frequency is identical, indicating that these words hold the same significance within the corpus. Secondly, concordance analysis demonstrated that despite the presence of shared contextual categories, their distribution within each of these categories significantly differs.Thirdly, they tend to be used together with similar lexical word groups. This similarity in the functioning of the words "enemy" and "Vietnamese" is attributed to the fact that in the context of the Vietnam War, the word "Vietnamese" acquired an additional lexical meaning synonymous with "enemy".
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