Abstract
<jats:p>This study is devoted to a corpus-based analysis of the literary space representation in J. R. R. Tolkien’s novella “The Hobbit, or There and Back Again”. The relevance of the research is due to the need to refine the theoretical foundations for describing locative categories in literary texts and to further develop corpus linguistic methods for the analysis of literary works. The material of the study is the original text of the novella organized into a balanced linguistic corpus comprising 5,648 contexts (sentences) or 113,650 tokens. The lexical units “mountain”, “river”, and “lake” were selected as the objects of analysis, representing the basic types of locative organization in the fictional world. The study employs methods of corpus analysis, contextual and semantic analysis, as well as descriptive analysis. The results show that the selected lexical units exhibit stable locative characteristics and perform a range of functions, including locative, delimiting, dynamic, axiological, symbolic, and structure-forming functions. It is demonstrated that “mountain” constructs a vertically organized locative model and functions as a center, boundary, teleological goal, and symbolic space of power and myth; “river” represents a linear-dynamic space of communication, movement, and boundary-making; “lake” realizes a model of enclosed, deep, and ambivalent space. It is concluded that the literary space in Tolkien’s work has an independent semantic organization and can be effectively described using corpus-based methods without necessarily invoking the chronotope category. The findings expand the potential of corpus linguistics in the study of locative categories in literary texts.</jats:p>