Diachronic Changes in the Frequency of Color Designation in Russian Poetic Texts

Abstract

We propose a statistical-diachronic approach to the description of color designations in poetic texts in Russian. Methods of corpus linguistics and the semantic annotation of the Russian National Corpus (RNC) applied in the research have revealed certain patterns of change in the frequency ` in poetic texts from 1750 to 1999. A quantitative characteristic of the poetic corpus of the RNC is presented by decades of the period under study. We also provide a general description of its poetry corpus (number of texts, number of authors, searching techniques, the semantic annotation, etc.). Also presented is the authors' classification of adjectives with the color tag of the semantic annotation.The study has revealed the RNC inconsistency in the assignment of color tags during the semantic annotation. In the authors’ opinion, this defect could affect the results of the study; however, the spotted tendencies in frequency behavior of color adjectives seem to be reliable.The research method is based on the comparison of statistical indicators for each decade in the specified range. Accordingly, the charts are plotted with reference to the average values for the range, unlike the RNC Charts tool, where a chart is based on the points for each year with a smoothing coefficient. Also, the indicators in the poetic corpus are compared with the corresponding data in the prose corpus. It has been reliably established that in the texts of the poetry corpus the frequency of color designations is higher than in the texts from basic, newspaper and oral corpora regardless of the part of speech the words belong to. The highest frequency (IPM) values of all adjectives that have the color tag of the RNC semantic annotation are observed in the last decades of the 19th - first decades of the 20th centuries. The frequency behavior of adjectives belonging to different classes differs significantly in different periods. In the texts of the 18th century, the analogous adjectives (or the adjectives of secondary nomination, such as златой (golden), янтарный (amber), etc.) prevail. In the texts of the 19th century adjectives – quasi-colors, (such as светлый (light), тёмный (dark), бледный (pale), etc.) are most frequent whereas in the texts of the 20th century the color adjectives per se have the highest frequency. While ranking the data selected from all the periods in the descending order, the first 28 ranks were occupied by the adjectives denoting achromatic colors – black and white. The article also defines prospects for our further research of color designations in Russian: specifying classification of color adjectives, looking at statistical aspects of their polysemy, and comparison of their use frequency by individual authors.