Skojarzenia werbalne w Narodowym Korpusie Języka Polskiego: przyczynek do badań nad werbalnym stereotypem inwalidy
Verbal Associations in the National Corpus of Polish: A Contribution to the Study of the Verbal Stereotype of inwalida ‘an invalid’

Summary/Abstract: The role of corpus research in linguistics and in related fields of study has increased in recent decades. Searching for and analysis of collocations and concordances of a lexical unit, which makes it possible to determine its semantic preferences and semantic prosody, can be a tool for studying stereotypes, understood as overly generalized and simplified evaluative and affective images of a fragment of reality named by the lexical unit. The aim of this article is to verify the validity of supplementing studies based on the analysis of corpus resources with data obtained in free association tests. The study focuses on the lexical unit inwalida ‘an invalid’ as the name of a concept which may be subject to strong stereotyping. The resources of the balanced sub-corpus of the National Corpus of Polish, consisting of about 250 million words, were searched for associative responses to the word inwalida given by at least 2 people from a group of 40 Polish speakers. In the corpus, the co-occurrence of the word inwalida was checked with each of the 33 obtained associations, using a search tool to identify the contexts (concordances) containing both words – inwalida and the association – with an interval of 0 and ≤5. The results of the study indicate that an association test can be a significant complement to corpus data analyses: it can provide important elements of semantic prosody which are not found in corpus analysis results, it can guide concordance search and it can indicate the elements which are the most important for the meaning of the examined word.

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