Quantitative analysis of lexical units in the bilingual work of V. V. Nabokov "Camera Obscura"

The article is dedicated to the quantitative analysis of lexemes representing two selected linguoconcepts, using the works of V. V. Nabokov's novel "Camera Obscura" and its English adaptation "Laughter in the Dark" as material. The aim of the study is to identify the frequency characteristics of key linguoconcepts and to determine the degree of their verbalization in the two language versions of the work. The subject of the research includes lexical units that verbalize the key linguoconcepts selected for analysis in both language versions of the work, as well as their frequency, structural, and comparative characteristics. In addition, the research subject includes the comparison of the author's ways of linguoconceptualization in the two language systems, which allows for identifying which elements of the linguoconceptosphere are retained, transformed, or lost when transitioning from the Russian to the English version of the text. In this study, linguistic statistical methods, comparative analysis of the use of lexical units, and the software tool WordStat for counting their frequency were employed. As a result, the most frequent linguistic units participating in the representation of the studied linguoconcepts were identified and presented, allowing for the establishment of differences in the degree of their verbalization in the Russian and English texts. The novelty of the work lies in its bilingual approach to quantitative analysis, as unlike most existing studies that are limited to material from one language or mainly focus on translation difficulties, this work offers a comprehensive statistical and comparative analysis of the two versions of "Camera Obscura" created by V. V. Nabokov himself. The conclusions drawn confirm the affiliation of the analyzed linguoconcepts to the number of key concepts, as well as demonstrate differences in the nature of their verbalization in the two versions of the work, reflecting the features of V. V. Nabokov's imagery system as a bilingual writer. The obtained data can be utilized in studies on conceptual analysis, linguistic statistics, translation studies, as well as in examining authors' strategies for representing linguoconcepts in bilingual and multilingual texts.

Quantitative analysis, lingvoconcept, bilingualism, verbalization, absolute frequency, relative frequency, bilingual text, conceptual sphere, linguistic statistics, computational linguistics