HOSPITALITY FROM THE RUSSIAN AND VIETNAMESE PERSPECTIVES: WEB CORPORA ANALYSIS

Abstract

The article presents a fragment of the large-scale international study aimed at investigating the Russians and Vietnamese self- and mutual perceptions embedded in language and culture. In order to discriminate the cultural difference in the content of the notions designated by the quasi-equivalent lexemes in the two languages, the authors attempt to analyze one of the common characteristics of Russian and Vietnamese “self-portraits”. The notion of hospitality (гостеприимство/hiếu khách) was examined using corpus data. The SketchEngine and two built-in web corpora, ruTenTen11 and VietnameseWaC, were utilized for automatic construction of thesauri of this notion. It was shown that the sets of semantic components that describe the studied lexical unit demonstrate certain degree of incongruity and provide additional information about Russian and Vietnamese “self-portraits” that include quasi-equivalent lexis.