What Can Science, Religion, Politics, Culture and the Economy Do? : A Corpus Study of Metonymical Conceptualization Combined with Personification

Abstract

The study analyses occurrences of Russian nouns meaning‘science’,‘religion’,‘economy’,‘politics’and‘culture’as human-like subjects. This kind of use isinterpreted as an example of a conceptualization described as PERSONIFICATION-WITH-METONYMY.On the basis of the fact that Russian examples work well intranslation into other languages, we assume that similar conceptualization ofthese abstract nouns is not completely language-dependent. The study isbased on the analysis of examples taken from Integrum, a large non-annotated Russian corpus. The large number of examples found in newspapertexts and documented both quantitatively and qualitatively suggests thatsuch non-annotated corpora can be used for studying conceptualization.