Computing Concreteness Ratings of Russian and English Most Frequent Words: Contrastive Approach

摘要

The article presents results of exploring differences of perceiving words as concrete or abstract by Russians and Americans. The research was mostly motivated by the extensive theoretical demand for understanding the notion of concreteness / abstractness but limited research implemented on the matter discussed in academia. Semantic differential measurement technique and online survey of over 500 respondents were used to compile concreteness / abstractness ratings of 500 most frequent Russian nouns and contrast them with concreteness / abstractness ratings of American English equivalents. To reveal the causes of differences in American / Russian equivalents’ ratings we also performed Corpus analysis of these words and demonstrated that distributional patterns and frequency of collocations in the Corpus impact concreteness / abstractness.