English-Russian parallel corpus as a tool for contextual analysis of the lexical unit “kindness”

The research aims to identify contextual meanings of the lexical unit “kindness” and its translation equivalents, obtained through a continuous sample from texts in the Russian-English parallel corpus of the Russian National Corpus. The paper shows that referring to multiple authentic examples based on corpora makes it possible to clarify the meaning of the lexical unit in the context of the original and its translation, identify non-trivial semantic and discursive features of the word, and highlight non-standard translation equivalents. The research is novel in that it is the first to examine and describe meanings that are not recorded in bilingual and explanatory dictionaries but do exist in specific semantic and pragmatic conditions. The research findings confirm that referring to multiple equivalents presented in translated texts of the parallel corpus helps to identify variations in the use of the lexical unit “kindness” that are not mentioned in its traditional descriptions.