Lexical Portrait of an Oral Story: a Corpus Study of Speech of Two Generations of Native Speakers of Russian

Abstract

The article is devoted to the quantitative and statistical analysis of the vocabulary of the oral stories corpus based on pictures. The subjects were 42 people, monolingual native speakers of the Russian (representatives of 15 families). The purpose of the study is to identify and describe the lexical parameters that distinguish the oral stories of representatives of different generations. An attempt is made to consider the connection of these parameters with the formation of native speakers’ ideas about the lexical structure of the narrative. The following results are obtained. The nature of the stimulus material ensured an approximately equal degree of complexity in the texts of both groups, although the volume of the parents’ active vocabulary significantly exceeded the volume of the children’s vocabulary. At the level of individual texts, both groups use equally diverse vocabulary per unit of text volume. In the children’s stories, the main “plot” vocabulary is quite heterogeneous, while the parents tend to lexical unification of the narrative. In the texts of both groups, local reference and direction of movement are expressed in the same way, which indicates their “basic” narrative function, which does not depend on the age of the subjects. The stories of the parents are also unified in terms of vocabulary, showing the logical structure of the narrative and different types of semantic relations in the text.