Cultural conditionality of stability of same frame scenario binomial phrases in Russian and English

The purpose of this study is to investigate how the variability of a binomial phrase structure cor- relates with the cultural specificity of the perception of the situation. It has been hypothesized that binomial phrases, such as patience and labour / labour and patience, can be viewed as a relator structure in which cognitive focusing is realized on the basis of such principles as the iconic order of words (positioning of the element of the structure) and distance of the structure elements from each other. The first component of the phrase bears the dominant concept specific to a particular culture. The low variability of the structure indi- cates that the cognitive focus in this phrase is stable, which means it has categorical values for this linguistic culture. A linguistic experiment based on the corpus-driven approach employing Google yielded the fol- lowing results: in binomial phrases, comprising nouns of the same frame scenario, dominant and low-dom- inant concepts generally coincide in two languages, which may be due to the common information space of these abstract concepts; changes in cognitive focus specify cultural perception of these binomial pairs.