Stylistic Labels <i>Bookish</i> and <i>Colloquial</i> in Phraseological Dictionaries

Abstract

The article deals with discrepancies between stylistic labels of phraseological units in various dictionaries, which is considered to be one of the deep-rooted issues in lexicography. The authors compiled an electronic dataset of four phraseological dictionaries of the Russian language and then analysed the use of the stylistic labels knizhnoje (bookish) and razgovornoje (colloquial) in them. The results demonstrate considerable discrepancies between the dictionaries both in the set of stylistic labels and in the density of stylistic information. In addition, the relevance of stylistic labels, in particular that of razgovornoje (colloquial), varies considerably. The authors then statistically explored the connection between the stylistic labels knizhnoje (bookish) or razgovornoje (colloquial) and other stylistic characteristics using the chi-square test. Only a few pairs of stylistic labels have been found to possess a statistically significant connection, among them knizhnoje (bookish) and vysokoje (elevated), ustarevshee (archaic) and knizhnoje (bookish) as well as the combination of razgovornoje (colloquial) and emotive and expressive labels. The main differences in the stylistic labeling of one phraseological unit in different dictionaries have been found to include the discrepancy between the labels razgovornoje (colloquial) and prostorechnoje (vernacular) as well as assigning the label knizhnoje (bookish) in one dictionary and the label razgovornoje (colloquial) or prostorechnoje (vernacular) in the other. In the final part of the article, the authors apply a corpus-oriented approach to verify the stylistic labels knizhnoje (bookish) or razgovornoje (colloquial) by comparing the frequency of the corresponding phraseological units in corpora of fiction and colloquial speech respectively. According to the results, less than a half of the analysed phraseological units correspond to the stylistic label assigned to them in the dictionary. The debatable cases in terms of being knizhnoje (bookish) or razgovornoje (colloquial) were then analysed and found to predominantly occur in the corpus of fiction. On the basis of the findings it is concluded that the corpus-oriented approach can be used for assigning and verifying stylistic labels as long as the technical limitations and the heterogeneity of the units in phraseological dictionaries are taken into account.