Russian and Vietnamese Self-Perceptions: Corpus Study Data

The article presents interim results of the large-scale international study aimed at discovering self- and mutual perceptions of the Russians and the Vietnamese found in language and culture. The authors attempted to describe selected common characteristics of the Russian and Vietnamese self-portraits , namely courage (смелость/dũng cảm), hospitality (гостеприимство/hiếu khách), industriousness (трудолюбие/cần cù), and intelligence ( ум/thông minh) , using corpus linguistics approach. The investigation was conducted using built-in tools of Sketch Engine platform and two corpora, included in the system: Russian (ruTenTen11) and Vietnamese (VietnameseWaC). It was shown that the Russian courage , before all, is gallantry, bravery, and valor, whereas courageous Vietnamese stay calm and vigilant in the face of danger. The hospitality of both peoples is described as generous, but for Russians it is more important to demonstrate their cordiality, and for Vietnamese - that their hospitality is superior. Both the Russians and the Vietnamese are hard working , but for the former it is a means of achieving some result ( goal commitment, persistence ), and for the latter it is related to fight against poverty and overcoming difficulties. According to corpus data, intelligence is closely related to consciousness and soul for Russians, and to wisdom, courage, and simplicity - for Vietnamese. The corpus-based thesauri obtained in the study show incongruity between the sets of semantic components of the studied lexical units and provide additional information about Russian and Vietnamese self-portraits that include quasi-equivalent lexis. It was shown that the corpus data partially confirm the results of the earlier questionnaire-based study. The study supports the assumption that the data obtained using traditional ethnopsycholinguistic methods can be effectively analyzed by corpus linguistics methods and by this combined approach comprehensive description of the meanings of the “common” cultural phenomena of various peoples can be obtained.