INTERACTION OF STATISTICAL AND LEXICAL-SEMANTIC CHARACTERISTICS OF ADJECTIVES IN DIFFERENT SYNTACTIC FUNCTIONS IN THE ENGLISH ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING TEXTS

The aim of the proposed article is to describe the results of the study concerning the interaction of statistical and lexical-semantic characteristics of adjectives in the attributive and predicative functions, which are found in the English texts referred to scientific and technical discourse. The research was based on the text corpus of the spetialty “Electrical Engineering”. The sources of the text corpus were scientific articles published in the relevant scientific journals of UK and the USA: IEEE Transactions on Power Apparatus and Systems, Proceedings of the Institution of Electrical Engineers. The total volume of the corpus is 200 thousand tokens. The analysis included three stages. The main methods used in the study were the following: literature review, contextual analysis, expert assessment method, i.e. survey of electrical specialists, statistical methods of calculation and others. The first stage involved the creation of a text corpus, compilation of a frequency dictionary of word forms (probabilistic-statistical model), selection of a list of adjectives and determination of their statistical characteristics, as well as their distribution regarding syntactic functions. A significant predominance of attributive adjectives over predicative ones was discovered. The second stage was devoted to stratification of the list of adjectives into three lexical layers, calculation of quantitative indicators of units of each lexical layer. Calculations showed that the most numerous is the commonly used layer, in second place is the general scientific layer, and the terminological layer turned out to be the most insignificant in terms of the number of lexemes. At the third stage, the interaction of statistical, lexical-semantic and grammatical characteristics of adjectives was considered. As a result, significant coincidences were found (with a small degree of exceptions), which could be caused by the undoubted dependence of the three analyzed characteristics on each other during their interaction in texts.