Contrastive analysis of the Russian and English spoken languages through relevance hierarchies

Abstract

The article discusses similarities and dissimilarities between the communication patterns of native speakers of the Russian and English languages in two geographically separated regions based on the transcripts of podcasts, TV and radio broadcasts for the audiences of Russia and the USA. Here we advance a hypothesis that such patterns can be represented in a hierarchical form. Using the occurrence rates of Russian and English lexical units, hierarchies are built, referred to as the relevance hierarchies. These structures based on the texts in the two languages are compared to identify notions, phenomena and topics that are the most relevant in the language communities under consideration and thus give an insight into the current worldview of native speakers. Additionally, we carry out a morphological analysis of the first 500 units and divide them by parts of speech in both languages’ hierarchies. We determine the occurrence rates of individual grammatical categories in the compared sets of texts. On the given scale, the so-called grammatically unambiguous nouns and verbs are listed and correlated for the two languages. We point out the most relevant notions in the English and Russian discourses, draw parallels and note differences. The paper is concluded by possible explanations and views about language-specific characteristics, as well as by remarks on some stylistic peculiarities in native speakers’ use of their respective mother tongues. Finally, we outline potential areas of further study by stressing the importance of context-based analysis and present our research method in the form of a Web tool as an initial step in this direction.