Title Portrayal of criminals in the u.s., the u.k., and lithuania: extended unit of meaning analysis /
Translation of Title Nusikaltėlių vaizdavimas Jungtinėse Valstijose, Jungtinėje Karalystėje ir Lietuvoje: išplėstinio reikšmės vieneto analizė.
Authors Radzevičiūtė, Kamilė
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Pages 77
Keywords [eng] criminals, offenders, convicts, collocations, connotations, semantic prosody, BNC, COCA, nusikaltėliai, pažeidėjai, nuteistieji, kolokacijos, konotacijos
Abstract [eng] Little research has been done on analyzing criminal portrayals across different languages. The present paper presents a corpus-based analysis of nouns criminal, offender and convict in the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and Lithuanian nouns nusikaltėlis (En. ‘criminal’), pažeidėjas (En. ‘offender’) and nuteistasis (En. ‘convict’) in the Corpus of Contemporary Lithuanian (Vytautas Magnus University 2022, hereafter, COCL). The aim of this research is to analyse collocations of the chosen nouns in the BNC, COCA and COCL by applying Sinclair’s extended unit of meaning analysis to reveal how criminals are portrayed in the U.S., U.K, and Lithuania. Additionally, the distribution of collocations across the registers was studied and compared across corpora. The research revealed that in the British English, American English and Lithuanian, the portrait of criminal includes both monstrous and celebrity-like attributes, whereas, the portrait of offenders and convicts consist of more neutral images. Some differences and similarities across the corpora were identified as well.
Dissertation Institution Vilniaus universitetas.
Type Master thesis
Language English
Publication date 2022