Dynamics of process constituent representation of sports event in diachronic corpus

The article presents an overview of opinions on Corpus linguistics, methodology of corpus researches is discussed in synchronic and diachronic perspectives, and the corpus statistical tools are discussed as a means to reveal the thematic organization of the text and build a cognitive-and-discursive model to describe a genre prototype for a group of texts. Corpus linguistics tools are applied to the compiled diachronic corpus of news texts about sports events at Olympiads in 1908 and 1948 (retrieved from “The British Newspaper Archive” with 46552 and 63093 words per sub-corpus). Categorization of the process for sports event was carried out with the support of AntConc that allowed to extract lists of words for each sub-corpus, reconstruct semantic means of process representation, identify the lock words that represent the sports event in the two sub-corpora. Having compared the key words from the 1948 sub-corpus with the 1908-referential-sub-corpus, the researchers hold cognitive-and-semantic analysis of verbs and highlighted semantic peculiarities in representation of sports events in every period; some dynamic changes were discovered, including a growing number of verbs that give a detailed description of the sports event (verbs of movement, acts and activity, physical and emotional states, modus verbs that pointed to low-efficiency of efforts and acts). The data prove efficiency of statistic tools in modeling the topic nuclei and distinguishing prototypical semantic content for a group of texts that belong to one genre but were written in different historical periods. Generalization of the data can open a route to a cognitive-and-discursive model of a genre and help in distinguishing historical and cultural peculiarities of its realization in discourse.