LINGUOSTATISTICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE NOUNS EAST-WEST, NORTH-SOUTH IN FICTION

Abstract

The article deals with the functional analysis ofpeculiarities of spatial nouns in the texts of contemporary English-fiction. The purpose of the investigation is carried out with the help of component analysis and application of methods of mathematical statistics. The object of research is the words included into the first thousandof the most frequent words of contemporary English. These spatial nouns are east-west, north-south. Thenotion of space is one of the categories, the study of which leads to the development of science, art and human culture in general.The effectiveness of its activity depends on the way a person perceives spatial aspects of the surrounding world, how he relates to space. In the paradigmatic aspect of the study, the semantic structure of the analyzed words has beenspecialized. The main parameters of the research in the syntagmatic aspect are frequency, prevalence, grammatical combinability. The analysis of vocabulary definitions in the language systemhas shown that the studied nouns have stable characteristics in the analyzed dictionaries: all of them belong to the maximum degree of the stability of the spaceseme. It has been proved that the main factor that delimits the functional characteristics of spatial nouns east-west, north-south, is their frequency. The combinability of semantically compatible words is determined by their semantics and belonging to a particular class. Hence the division of combinability falls into two types: lexical and grammatical.The grammatical combinability of the analyzed nouns is represented by the lists of patterns. The research has confirmed the validity of the law of superiority, the essence of which is that in speech, a small number of grammatical patterns, which have a high frequency and carry the maximum of functional load, prevails. The pattern sets of nouns east-west, north-south are similar intheir nuclear patterns (75 % of the investigated material) and differ from patterns that are at the periphery (10 % of the studied material). The coefficient of similarity of grammatical combinability in the nuclear significantly exceeds the coefficient of peripheral patterns.