LEXICAL SEMANTICS OF CONFLICT IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN ENGLISH: A CORPUS-BASED STUDY

Abstract

Conflict is an essential notion in various spheres of knowledge, since it represents some of the most complex aspects of human existence, which makes this lexeme worthwhile for linguistic analysis. The present research aims to study the semantic aspects of conflict by means of analyzing its lexical environments in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The study investigates how the surrounding lexical items contribute to the diverse meanings of this complicated concept. The research dataset includes 397 most frequent collocations with adjectives, verbs and nouns. The methods employed in the paper include contextual analysis, semantic clustering, and collostructional analysis. As a result, 23 semantic clusters for adjective + conflict, verb + conflict, conflict + noun, noun + conflict have been identified. The findings show that conflict is often discussed in legal, diplomatic, and interpersonal contexts, and is revealed in metaphors related to temperature (“heated conflict”), time (“endless conflict”), human being (“bloody conflict”), gastronomy (“bitter conflict”), theatre (“dramatic conflict”), etc., which emphasizes its destructive and strategic nature. Thus, the performed study points to the semantic complexity of conflict and its varied representations in modern language through the corpus analysis. The patterns including adjectives, verbs, and nouns, which are used with the lexeme conflict, offer the linguistic data on how conflicts are cognized, perceived, discussed, and managed in different contexts. The paper contributes to the understanding of the role of language in shaping the perceptions of conflict and may be of interest to scholars working in the fields of semantics, corpus linguistics, linguocultural research, conflict studies, and translation. Further research may benefit from extending the obtained findings to study other semantically both related and unrelated lexemes as well as analyze cross-language and cross-cultural comparisons of conflict in other language systems.