Combinatorial collocations of the attribute PERFECT (insights from the British National Corpus)

Abstract

The paper considers the attributive lexeme “perfect” as a linguistic and cultural phenomenon in the English language. The aim of the study is the semantic analysis of nominative collocations with “perfect”, based on the material of the British National Corpus (BNC), which contained about 3000 contextual occurrences, with the application of such methods as definition analysis, semantic and functional categorisation, quantitative analysis and cognitive modelling. From the theoretical standpoint, the research is valuable for a deeper understanding of the phenomenon and its semantic structure, especially in connection to its derivative “perfectionism” which is regarded as a professional term. Practically, the results can be interesting in the pedagogical context for teaching cognitive and translation studies, since “perfect” has a branched semantic structure and wide scope of use. As a result of the research, the function-based semantic structure of the concept was revealed: the immediate contextual collocations were identified; the semantic fields were described. The A+N structure, where A is filled with “perfect”, and N can be potentially represented with any noun from the BNC, was in the focus of the study. The findings show that about eighteen nouns can be qualified as typical due to their high occurrence rate, while the rest are characterized by different degrees of semantic proximity and were clustered into three peripheral semantic areas. As for the cognitive modelling, nineteen conceptual categories in the “perfect” interpretation field were identified, mainly of evaluation and function. The conceptual interpretation field was extended in terms of the qualitative meaning of the attribute “perfect”, owing to the interaction mechanism of pragmatic, communicative and linguistic factors which determine semantic relations of linguistic units under various contextual conditions.