Study of structural-semantic schemes of collocations of the lexeme "mission" in the French newspapers "Lib'eration" and "Le Figaro"

In January 2013, the French operation "Serval" began in Mali. This event was widely discussed in the French media. The article considers in detail the representation of this event in the largest daily national French newspaper "Libération" and "Le Figaro". We study the functioning of the lexeme "mission" as a denomination of the military event. The component analysis is applied for the determination of the semantic core of the lexical unit "mission". The component analysis is commonly defined as a method for studying the content side of significant units of a language. This method is aimed at decomposing the meaning into minimal semantic components. To analyze the functioning of the lexical unit in the French press, we compiled a corpus and selected the material according to the dates of the military event in the period from 01.11.2013 to 07.14.2014. The content analysis and selection of articles on operation "Serval" in Mali were carried out. We used the Sketch Engine program to work with the corpus. With help of various tools the units located in the immediate vicinity of the lexical unit "mission" were analyzed. The contexts were studied. The obtained data includes such indicators as the joint occurrence of word combinations "cooccurrences", the total number of word combinations in the corpus "candidates". To calculate the degree of connectivity of the parts of the collocation, the statistical measure MI Score was applied. On the basis of this study, we compiled the models that represent the Serval military event in the French press. As the result, the structural-semantic model of the lexical unit "mission" is created. It includes a large set of lexical units that can be systematized and divided into nuclear and peripheral ones.