Lexical-semantic clustering in the diagnostics of culture integration in discourse
Semantic clustering as a research method is commonly utilized to explore lexical systems transformations, meanwhile it can provide access to far more complicated processes of cognitive transformations in discourse or even culture. This work presents a cognitive-semantic approach to the study of cultural integration, based on semantic clustering. Two cognitive processes of cultural integration are identified: direct and indirect knowledge transfer. These are manifested in the direct and indirect translation of areas of knowledge from the donor culture to the recipient culture. The analysis procedure and results are demonstrated using a corpus of 864,005 examples of words borrowed from Russian into Kyrgyz from web discourse.
Objectives. The research objectives are to reveal the knowledge domains transferred directly from Russian to Kyrgyz culture through integrated loanwords in web discourse and to specify the roles of qualia in the indirect transfer of knowledge through loanword collocates.
Methods. While corpus analysis allows to identify the knowledge domains which are directly transferred from donor into recipient culture, semantic clustering helps specify the indirect culture integration since it explores the contexts mediated by the use of these domains.
Results. Based on the established lists of loanwords, the compiled database of their contexts and lexical-semantic clustering algorithm performed to identify their similarity in the context use of loanwords (accessed at https://osf.io/78u4m/), the study determined both the thematic attribution and qualia roles of the knowledge domains in direct and indirect knowledge transfer as a result of culture integration which is found in the context of Russian (as donor) and Kyrgyz (as recipient) cultures. Featuring 4,126 target words with their vector similarity weight identified, further analysis revealed their cognitive roles attributed to four qualia – formal, constitutive, telic, agentive, which were indirectly mediated by culture integration.
Conclusion. The study shows that, while direct knowledge transfer resulted in the penetration of novel thematic domains and the modification of existing ones, indirect knowledge transfer mostly resulted in the transformation of the formal role of encoding taxonomic information about the referent of the loanword. This suggests that the recipient culture adapted the knowledge domains within a wider domain matrix rather than adapting or transforming their components for more specific purposes. The results obtained provide evidence for novel applications of lexical-semantic clustering, as well as novel methods for exploring cultural integration and disintegration processes.
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Kiose, M. I., Khulkhachieva, Zh. S., Izyumskaya-Kapitonova, V. V., Barmin, A. V. (2025). Lexical-semantic clustering in the diagnostics of culture integration in discourse, Research Result. Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, 11 (4), 63–84.
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Corpus materials
Karasaev, Kh. K. (1986). The Dictionary of Loanwords: 5100 words. Frunze: Kyrgyz Sovet. (In Kyrgyz)
Kyrgyz Web Text Corpus. Leipzig Corpora, available at: https://wortschatz.uni-leipzig.de/en (Accessed 6 September 2025). (In English)
Python Documentation, 5. Data Structures (2025). Python Software Foundation. URL: https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/datastructures.html (Accessed 25 September 2025). (In English)
The Kyrgyz News Corpus dataset (2025). Hugging Face AI community. URL: https://huggingface.co/datasets/the-cramer-project/Kyrgyz_News_Corpus#kyrgyz_news_corpus (Accessed 6 September 2025). (In English)
Yudakhin, K. K. (1985). Kyrgyz-Russian Dictionary. Frunze: Glavnaya redaktsiya Kirgyzskoy Sovetskoy Entsiklopedii. (InRussian)
The research is part of the FSFU-2025-0004 Project “Assessment of cultural integration and disintegration processes in CIS countries: the study of communicative practices” which is being carried out at Moscow State Linguistic University.