Bober N. Matrix Profiling of the Semantics of Phrasal Emotive verbs in the British National Corpus

The thesis develops a new concept for the construction of the cognitive and semantic matrix of phrasal verbs denoting human emotional states in the British National Corpus. For the first time, a new definition of phrasal verbs is suggested as of unique cognitive and grammatical constructs of “a verb + a postpositive component” in the English language that reflect a grammatical pattern of their conceptually combinatorial construction based on conceptual integration mechanisms, being both innovative and conservative. Its innovativeness is in the selective metaphorical design of the conceptual structure using initial spaces and operations of involving background knowledge, while its conservatism lies in the formal and grammatical expression of a phrase formation according to the rules of the English grammar. To measure the capacity of these entities denoting human emotional states, a comprehensive technique for computer modeling of tag and cognitive and semantic submatrices (involving the BNC software) of all verbal designations capable of expressing those states has been developed. In the ВNC, an initial corpus catalogue of verbal designations for human emotional states has been compiled according to 8 cognitive and semantic tag submatrices: “Interest”, “Joy”, “Wonder”, “Grief”, “Anger”, “Disgust”, “Fear”, and “Guilt”. Basic grammatical models of verbal designations for human emotional states based on the Just The Word software for each cognitive and semantic submatrix have been constructed. Taken as a whole, these and other procedural techniques have made it possible to reconstruct cognitive and semantic links between the units under study along with quantitative and statistical estimation of their productivity for each profile and domain. Further use of the conceptual integration method contributed to the construction of corpus tagged submatrices of verbal designations for human emotional states with all their 8 lexical statistical profiles. The corpus tagged submatrices are modeled as cognitive and semantic submatrices that look like tables where each emotion is a model of a detailed pattern represented by criteria and indicators in specific columns of the table.