Corpus analysis of the co-occurrence of the concept hygge

Abstract

The notion that a language worldview is shaped by a system of key concepts as well as ideas and motifs linking them, which are expressed in the meaning of individual lexemes and phrases, has informed a number of studies of culturally specific words and even entire semantic fields. Comparison of different language worldviews has revealed many differences, which at first sight seem insignificant but may hinder successful communication. The concept of hygge occupies a special place in the Danish language worldview and has become somewhat of a Danish hallmark. Our study uses corpus data to analyse six co-occurrence patterns of words representing the concept hygge, which allows us to explicate the implicit meaning components of the lexemes in question and to identify the most frequent patterns. The material used was the Danish Gigaword Corpus (DAGW), which includes texts collected from the Internet. The corpus covers the Danish language in all its diversity: a variety of genres and types of texts are represented in the corpus (law, social media, subtitles, debates, conversation notes, encyclopaedia articles, fiction, news, etc.). The high frequency of the words representing the concept hygge in the corpus texts once again confirms the importance of this concept for Danish culture. The combinational properties of all the models studied show a striking uniformity: all collocations are characterized by positive connotations and can be categorized into a small set of thematic groups (place, time, atmosphere, hobbies, spending time together and communicating). The above co-occurrence analysis allows us to identify the following set of characteristics of the concept hygge: a feeling of peace, tranquillity and security, enjoyment and good mood that comes from being engaged in active pursuits, presence of close, familiar people, a familiar, wellknown place, a shared time together.