The Concept of “Volia” in the Modern Ukrainian Language: A Corpus-Based Approach to the Analysis of Conceptual Content

This paper presents a corpus-based research on the concept of “volia” in modern Ukrainian language. It focuses on dynamic changes of the concept of “volia” within the context of social, political, and historical transformations of Ukrainian society in the 20th and 21st centuries. The study examines the processes of concept’s metaphorization and shifts in the semantics of concept’s verbalizers. The research utilizes the General Regionally Annotated Corpus of the Ukrainian Language (GRAC) as its empirical foundation. This analysis reveals correlations between the type of context and the concept’s frequency, displaying specific conceptual senses across different periods. Additionally, the study examines the concept’s synonymous verbalizers, including their distribution and rating position within chronological corpora. This allows us to trace tendencies in the dynamics of conceptualization. Six conceptual profiles of the “volia” concept are identified. Concordance and collocation analysis offer insights into the combinability of “volia” and its synonyms within each profile. This approach helps identify core cognitive features of the concept and highlight the specific ways in which the content of the concept has developed. Ultimately, these findings demonstrate the effectiveness of the corpus-based approach in revealing the dynamic nature of the concept’s semantics and its susceptibility to discourse influences.