Russian Corpus Research Articles

Comparative Study of Metaphors and Metonymies of Russian and Chinese Related to Word "Hand"

Language comparison is a powerful tool in linguistics. It not only deepens the understanding of the linguistic characteristics of the language being compared, but also helps to analyze the characteristics of cross-language and cross-cultural human thinking. The purpose of this thesis is to supplement the deficiencies of previous studies, conduct a comprehensive comparison of "hand" metaphors and metonyms in Chinese and Russian, use corpus methods to estimate their generality in the two languages, and analyze the Russian language reflected by these metaphors and metonyms. and characteristics of Chinese culture. Literature research method: This paper sorts out the metaphor and metonymy of "hand" in Russian and Chinese on the basis of researching metaphors, idioms, word-formation literature, dictionaries and other materials. This study concludes that first, compared with Russian words for "hand", metonymy and metaphor are more frequently used in Chinese. Second, there are more "hand" word metaphors than metonymy in the Chinese corpus, but there is no big difference in the number of metonymy and metaphor in the Russian corpus. Third, the metonymy of "hand" words in Chinese and Russian is relatively similar, and the difference between metaphors is more obvious, which shows that culture has a greater influence on metaphors, such as the characteristics of the showman's culture, gestures and other non-verbal communication habits, etc.

Вокални жестове и междуметия като част от речевия портрет на персонажите в български анимационни филми

Initial ideas for a multi-aspect analysis of vocal gestures (as an indication of a physiological reaction) and interjections (as linguistic signs) in the Bulgarian language on material from Bulgarian cartoons (The Three Fools by D. Donev) are presented. Intonational layout, gestural accompaniment, context and situational conditioning help to identify the meaning and disambiguate vocal gestures. Cartoons are used as an analogue of the multimodal Russian corpus as a source of illustrative examples. E. I. Grishina's methodology for describing vocal gestures in the Russian language and the possibilities of its application for the analysis of similar units in Bulgarian cartoons are examined. A classification of verbal gestures is presented, consisting of three groups: 1) exclamations, 2) interjections, 3) particles. Examples from cartoons can be used as illustrative material. They have a significant hitherto unused research, scientific-applied, linguistic didactic potential.

Параметризация как способ реализации прототипической модели в русских и английских народных загадках

This article is devoted to the analysis of the structural features of Russian and English folk riddles containing parametric data in the descriptive part. The purpose of the study is to identify the features of the implementation of prototypical constructions of folk riddles containing an indication of the parametric data of the denotation. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the fact that for the first time Russian and English riddles are analyzed from the point of view of the linguistic implementation of a stable prototypical model of the enigmatic genre. For the first time, the inclusion of parametric indicators in the descriptive part of a folk riddle is considered as a way to realize the effect of an illogical consequence typical for the structure of the genre organization; in addition, the authors for the first time investigate the presence of a “linguocultural” codification of the denotation through parametric data. The results showed that the inclusion of parametric indicators in the description of the denotation is due to the need to implement a prototypical model of the enigmatic genre – the model of illogical consequence. In addition, it was found that the inclusion of parametric indicators in the English and Russian corpus of folk riddles is often implemented using zoomorphic and anthropomorphic codes. During the analysis of the illustrative material, it was found that for the Russian folk riddle, the appeal to parameters is associated with the tendency to describe a number of independent objects as a single mechanism, which directly reveals the logic of archaic human thinking, while the appeal to parametric data within the framework of the English riddle is motivated by the description of a procedural action.

КОРПУСНОЕ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЕ ФУНКЦИОНИРОВАНИЯ ФРАЗОВЫХ ГЛАГОЛОВ В ВАРИАНТАХ АНГЛИЙСКОГО ЯЗЫКА

Corpus-based studies of phrasal verbs have pointed to different features of phrasal verbs. The aim of this research is to compare phrasal verbs functioning in different varieties of the English language – the varieties from the Inner Circle and the varieties from the Expanding Circle. For this purpose, the corpus data are used. Statistical analysis is carried out with the help of R software environment for statistical computing. The results show that phrasal verbs are used less frequently in the Russian corpus in comparison with native (British and American) corpora. Besides, it is found out that some phrasal verbs are used in the Russian corpus differently from native corpora.

«Обними меня»: три эпохи русского жеста «объятие» (по данным корпуса МУРКО)

The article examines the formal characteristics of the Russian gesture of embrace (Russian: ob”yatie, объятие) as depicted in feature films. The study material consists of video episodes from Soviet and post-Soviet films of the 20th century, represented in the Multimodal Russian Corpus (MURCO) of the Russian National Corpus. The focus is on the duration of the gesture with the emphasis on its beginning and ending phases. The determination of gesture duration necessitates a scientific justification of its elementary structure, delineating crucial phases (preparation—stroke—retraction), and exploring its potential as a social tactile gesture. The research also aims to analyze the cinema aesthetics of three epochs exemplified by films from the 1930s, 1960s, and 1990s. Different approaches to film montage, sociocultural and political contexts, meaning genesis in the film, as well as the perspectives of the director, actor, and viewer significantly influence what we see in feature films. Consequently, the question arises of whether a valid study of gestures can be conducted using film material, and it is resolved affirmatively. The results indicate that the realization of the gesture ob”yatie varies. The preparation phase is often a manual movement, while the retraction phase is characterized by the departure of one participant from the situation, ending physical contact at a certain point of the stroke. The proposed method of defining the beginning and ending of the gesture helped to reveal the shortest embrace in the 1936 film Circus (Russian: Цирк) and the longest gesture in the 1961 film My Friend, Kolka! (Russian: Друг мой, Колька!). On average, the duration of the embrace ranges from 6 to 13 seconds.

Keyphrase generation for the Russian-language scientific texts using mT5

In this work, we applied the multilingual text-to-text transformer (mT5) to the task of keyphrase generation for Russian scientific texts using the Keyphrases CS&Math Russian corpus. The automatic selection of keyphrases is a relevant task of natural language processing since keyphrases help readers find the article easily and facilitate the systematization of scientific texts. In this paper, the task of keyphrase selection is considered as a text summarization task. The mT5 model was fine-tuned on the texts of abstracts of Russian research papers. We used abstracts as an input of the model and lists of keyphrases separated with commas as an output. The results of mT5 were compared with several baselines, including TopicRank, YAKE!, RuTermExtract, and KeyBERT. The results are reported in terms of the full-match F1-score, ROUGE-1, and BERTScore. The best results on the test set were obtained by mT5 and RuTermExtract. The highest F1-score is demonstrated by mT5 (11,24 %), exceeding RuTermExtract by 0,22 %. RuTermextract shows the highest score for ROUGE-1 (15,12 %). According to BERTScore, the best results were also obtained using these methods: mT5 — 76,89 % (BERTScore using mBERT), RuTermExtract — 75,8 % (BERTScore using ruSciBERT). Moreover, we evaluated the capability of mT5 for predicting the keyphrases that are absent in the source text. The important limitations of the proposed approach are the necessity of having a training sample for fine-tuning and probably limited suitability of the fine-tuned model in cross-domain settings. The advantages of keyphrase generation using pre-trained mT5 are the absence of the need for defining the number and length of keyphrases and normalizing produced keyphrases, which is important for flective languages, and the ability to generate keyphrases that are not presented in the text explicitly.

The Language of Health Promotion in British and Russian Digital Media: A Comparative Study

The research explores the language of health promotion used in Health matters and Tak zdorovo – the national healthcare websites of the UK and Russia. The objective is to assess readability of the British and Russian texts as well as to reveal language properties and cultural implications of health promotion in national digital media. The comparative design of the study involves qualitative (contextual and interpretative) and quantitative (Compleat Lexical Tutor v.8.5 and Flesch-Kincaid grade) methods. The topic distribution results show that physical activity, healthy eating and weight control, tobacco smoking, alcohol dependence, mental health are raised in both cultures, however, the British corpus puts more emphasis on mental health issues compared to the Russian one. There are differences in 'positive' vs 'negative' approach in covering alcohol consumption issues. The findings on readability reveal higher rates of lexical density and lexical variety in the Russian corpus in comparison to the British one. However, the overall lexical coverage and readability index in the British (K-3) and Russian corpora (SIS – 8.68) are equally low, which means that the language of health promotion in both cultures is easy to understand. The Russian language of advice demonstrates frequent use of imperatives. The British corpus employs less categorical recommendation forms including modal verbs, create partnering communication styles and demonstrate a higher use of visual forms of health promotion. The findings revealing differences in rhetoric strategies (rational reasoning in British digital media vs emotional reasoning in Russian digital media) can be attributed to national and cultural implications.

Multilingual hope speech detection: A Robust framework using transfer learning of fine-tuning RoBERTa model

Hope Speech Detection (HSD) from social media is a new direction for promoting and supporting positive content to encourage harmony and positivity in society. As users of social media belong to different linguistic communities, hope speech detection is rarely studied as a multilingual task considering low-resource languages. Moreover, prior studies explored only monolingual techniques, and the Russian language is not addressed. This study tackles the issue of Multi-lingual Hope Speech Detection (MHSD) in English and Russian languages using the transfer learning paradigm with fine-tuning approach. We explore joint multi-lingual and translation-based approaches to tackle the task of multilingualism, where the latter approach adopts the translation mechanism to transform all content into one language and then classify them. The joint multi-lingual method handles it by designing a universal classifier for various languages. We explore the strengths of the Robustly Optimized BERT Pre-Training Approach (RoBERTa) that showed a benchmark in capturing the semantics and contextual information within the content. The proposed framework consists of several stages: 1) data preprocessing, 2) representation of data using RoBERTa models, 3) fine-tuning phase, and 4) classification of hope speech into two labels. A new Russian corpus for hope speech detection is built, containing YouTube comments. Several experiments are conducted in English and Russian languages by using semi-supervised bilingual English and Russian datasets. The findings show that the proposed framework demonstrated benchmark performance and outperformed the baselines. Furthermore, the translation-based approach (Russian-RoBERTa) offered the best performance by achieving 94% accuracy and 80.24% f1-score.

Linguistic and statistical analysis of the lexical ‘Langue-Parole’ dichotomy in a restricted domain

Development of new digital methods for analyzing the ‘Langue-Parole’ dichotomy is one of the most sought-after, but least researched problems of modern theoretical and applied linguistics. This determines the relevance of this study, the purpose of which is to develop a methodology for the automated linguastatistical analysis of a domain-related lexical layer in the context of the ‘Langue-Parole’ dichotomy and to apply the methodology to the Russian-language domain “Research on athlete integrative physiology” (RAIP). The study was conducted on the material of the Russian-language corpus including 56 RAIP domain texts of 300,000 wordforms in total published over the 2013-2020 period in the scientific journals “People. Sport. Medicine” (formerly “SUSU Bulletin. Series “Education, Healthcare, Physical Culture”), “Theory and Practice of Physical Culture”, etc. The key methodological approach is the ontological analysis of corpus data using statistical and linguistic modeling methods. The domain-specific language and speech are modeled by the corresponding lexicon and corpus, while the ‘Langue-Parole’ lexical dichotomy is represented by the values of the linguistic-statistical concept verbalization parameters of the domain concepts in the lexicon and corpus. The computational parameters include the indices of lexical diversity, structural complexity, conceptual syncretism, lexical structural complexity vs. conceptual syncretism correlation, and syncretical concept junction when verbalized in the corpus. The main results of the study are: 1) а methodology for analyzing domain-specific lexical dichotomy ‘Langue-Parole’, which can be ported to other domains and national languages; 2) the RAIP domain-related resources, including language-independent ontology, conceptually annotated Russian corpus, onto-lexicon, linguistic-statistical parameter values of the lexical ‘Langue-Parole’ dichotomy; and 3) tools that automate certain stages of the study.

"Emotion" in the Russian and English language pictures of the world

The article describes the functioning of the concepts "emotion" in Russian and English. Emotion as a phenomenon of reality has a multifaceted logical nature, is culturally, lexically and axiologically conditioned. The structure of concepts that can be evaluated as equivalents formalizes the categorization and conceptualization of reality, shows a predisposition to interact with cross-cultural concepts. The existing reality is reflected by a set of nuclear and peripheral meanings of the concept "emotion". The meanings of words illustrate the presence of main and secondary signs, monocentricity and predisposition to the formation of diverse associative connections, which determines the boundaries of semantic variation of the word. In the English language picture of the world, the verbalization of the concept of "emotion" shows signs of a behavior marker, properties of a liquid substance, assessments of cultural life events, a space with a depth characteristic. In the Russian corpus of texts, based on the conducted sampling, the following cases of values were recorded: an attribute of behavior, someone's belonging, an obstacle, a device that can be turned off, an indicator of strong arousal. The author states that the theoretical provisions of the cognitive approach allow us to confidently speak about the correlation of the concept under consideration not only with feelings, but also with reason. In the course of the structural and semantic analysis of the presented constructions, a number of meanings of the polysemantic structure of this formation are revealed in the English-speaking and Russian-speaking semantic space.

Специфика построения цепочек прагматических маркеров при переводе русских художественных текстов на китайский язык

Introduction. Russian writers quite actively use pragmatic markers (PM) to create a speech portrait of a particular character. At the same time, studies have shown that Russian PMs are characterized by increased syntagmatic activity and tend to appear in text not alone but in ‘company’ with other similar units. Goals. The study seeks to analyze the methods employed to translate PM chains contained in Russian literary texts into Chinese — through the example of the markers eto, eto samoe and kak yego (yeyo, ikh). Materials and methods. The paper analyzes a total of 19 contexts from 8 Russian fiction works included in the main subcorpus of the National Russian Corpus — and their Chinese translations. The work employs purposeful sampling, as well as contextual, comparative and discursive types of analysis. Results. The study shows that the Russian eto samoe has no absolute Chinese equivalent in terms of form and function, which presents big challenges for translators. Only few of the latter were able to translate eto samoe using the Chinese counterparts 这个 zhe ge or 那个 na ge. Structural variants of the Russian pragmatic markers eto and kak yego (yeyo, ikh) are often found both in literary texts and Russian oral (live) speech. Translators easily associate the pragmatic marker kak yego (yeyo, ikh) with the full-value expression kak yego (yeyo, ikh) zovut/nazyvajut performing the same search-hesitation function, and the pragmatic marker eto with its Chinese counterparts 这个 zhe ge or 那个 na ge. As a result, when it comes to translate PM chains with the components kak yego (yeyo, ikh) and eto, functional equivalence is achieved much easier than in case of PM chains with the component eto samoe. Conclusions. The ability of pragmatic markers to ‘attract’ to each other further complicates both the procedure of their identification in a text and their translation into other languages.

THE USE OF CORPUS IN TEACHING RUSSIAN AS FOREIGN LANGUAGE: THE REVIEW OF THE EXPERIENCE OF ITALIAN AND OF BELARUSIAN STUDIES AND NEW "SEAH" RESOURCES

The article provides a detailed overview of the development of corpus linguistics applied to Russian language and a review of the most significant Italian and Belarusian publications on the use of corpora for the descriptive analysis of the Russian language and the teaching of Russian as LS. In this panorama, the author emphasises the innovative character and potential that the Ru_Seah corpus constitutes both on the Russian corpus linguistics front and for teaching Russian as a foreign language. The paper considers the experience of creating a professionally oriented Russian-language text corpus for students of Architecture and Construction using the Sketch Engine corpus manager as part of the SEAH project. It describes the aims and objectives of the project and the approach to the selection of material for the corpus. The paper explains the balance of the corpus, the inclusion of texts of different genres and styles in the corpus. It also deals with the elements of the search engine in relation to the annotation of the text corpus. The structure of educational modules compiled using the SEAH linguistic corpus is considered.

ИЗУЧЕНИЕ РЕАЛИЙ И СПОСОБОВ ИХ ПЕРЕВОДА ПРИ ПОМОЩИ КОРПУСОВ

The article addresses the problem of translating culture-bound words from Russian into English. Two culture-bound words дача and зачет are examined with the help of four parallel corpora (National Russian Corpus, Lingvo Live, Reverso Context, and Linguee). The author analyses the quality and quantity of examples in the corpora and compares the corpus tools.

К неоцененным граням кабардинских паремий

he article is devoted to the peculiarities of Kabardian proverbs, which appear when they are correlated with Russian ones and have not yet received proper research attention, since the practice of mass comparison of Russian and Kabardian proverbs (as well as proverbs of various ethnic groups) has not been established – this is hampered by serious difficulties in achieving adequate expression (transmission) meanings when translating ethno-proverbs into Russian. And episodic correlations of ethnic and Russian proverbs are limited to showing clearly exotic features (metaphorical, toponymic, zoomorphic) inherent in the proverbs of a certain ethnic group or comparisons of proverbs of different ethnic groups according to certain lexicalsemantic features in search of something in common between them. Taking these circumstances into account, a comparative analysis of the entire corpus of certified Kabardian proverbs and the well-known Russian corpus was undertaken. It is shown that Kabardian proverbs have fundamentally significant differences from Russian ones – they represent not only a storehouse of wisdom and an arsenal of folk pedagogy (which applies to proverbs of any ethnic group), but also a clearly articulated “voice of the court of traditions,” which gives them unusual intonations of sound and a special significance in the general cultural system.

Корпус официально-деловых текстов русского языка

This article discusses the Russian Corpus of Official Texts, which was created between 2018 and 2020. The Corpus contains 294 documents (2,183,493 words) embracing the entire history of Russia, from agreements between Rus’ and the Byzantine Empire (912) to the present. This is the first collection of legal documents in Russian of its kind. The authors also provide brief descriptions of the most important documents that aided in the early development of the Russian legal system. A table with data on a specific lexeme (svoboda (freedom)) by year derived from a search result exemplifies the Corpus’ capabilities. This Corpus will facilitate a whole range of tasks related to the enhancement of Russian officialese, the optimization of legal language, the study of legal writing and its genres, and the expansion of information available on the history of legal thought in Russia.

Manipulative use of political headlines in western and Russian online sources

The research identifies the amount of headline/article discrepancies in the corpora of western (the USA, the UK) and Russian online articles on sensitive political topics. A quarter of the western headlines and nearly half of the Russian headlines distort the publications they introduce. Language means and manipulative strategies employed by different sides vary considerably. Extensive use of expressive language and style variation are seen as leading causes of distortions in the western corpus. The rich imagery used by the authors (metaphors and metonymy in particular) forms emotional implicatures that affect the reader’s perception of the issue. In contrast, information substitution, subjective modality and selective citations are identified as major causes of distortions in the Russian corpus. Contributors to Russian news outlets rely on general rather than language manipulation strategies, including frequent use of logical fallacies and wrong generalizations. These techniques establish false logical sequences and wrong causative implicatures that compromise objective reporting. The underlying motives of the journalists’ creating false emotional and causative implicatures in the headlines lies beyond the scope of the study; however, it is assumed that intentional change of the information introduced by the headline could be viewed as a covert misinformation attempt.

Analysis of the Full-Size Russian Corpus of Internet Drug Reviews with Complex NER Labeling Using Deep Learning Neural Networks and Language Models

The paper presents the full-size Russian corpus of Internet users’ reviews on medicines with complex named entity recognition (NER) labeling of pharmaceutically relevant entities. We evaluate the accuracy levels reached on this corpus by a set of advanced deep learning neural networks for extracting mentions of these entities. The corpus markup includes mentions of the following entities: medication (33,005 mentions), adverse drug reaction (1778), disease (17,403), and note (4490). Two of them—medication and disease—include a set of attributes. A part of the corpus has a coreference annotation with 1560 coreference chains in 300 documents. A multi-label model based on a language model and a set of features has been developed for recognizing entities of the presented corpus. We analyze how the choice of different model components affects the entity recognition accuracy. Those components include methods for vector representation of words, types of language models pre-trained for the Russian language, ways of text normalization, and other pre-processing methods. The sufficient size of our corpus allows us to study the effects of particularities of annotation and entity balancing. We compare our corpus to existing ones by the occurrences of entities of different types and show that balancing the corpus by the number of texts with and without adverse drug event (ADR) mentions improves the ADR recognition accuracy with no notable decline in the accuracy of detecting entities of other types. As a result, the state of the art for the pharmacological entity extraction task for the Russian language is established on a full-size labeled corpus. For the ADR entity type, the accuracy achieved is 61.1% by the F1-exact metric, which is on par with the accuracy level for other language corpora with similar characteristics and ADR representativeness. The accuracy of the coreference relation extraction evaluated on our corpus is 71%, which is higher than the results achieved on the other Russian-language corpora.

Intensifiers in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Individual Style: Semantics of Irregular Lexical Combinations

The paper is dedicated to the analysis of irregular intensifying constructions in Fyodor Dostoevskys individual style, more specifically of irregular lexical combinations including an intensifier and a main word. The meaning of intensifies is completely focused on expressing the intensity of an attribute, action or state denominated by the main word. Fyodor Dostoevskys writing style tends to form certain types of irregular lexical combinations including intensifiers. Through a case study of intensifiers ochen , goryachii / goryacho , izo vsekh sil , etc. the article describes several main types of irregular combinations with the view to find out semantic effects of irregular combinability. The analysis has covered the complete corpus of Fyodor Doestoevskys texts (fiction, journalism, private correspondence, business correspondence and documents). The first discriminant mark of irregular combinations is the semantic contradiction between the terms, the violation of idiomatic compatibility rules is the second feature taken into account. Whereas collocational rules in modern Russian differ a lot from the language norms of the 19th century, the subcorpus of 19th century texts of the National Russian Corpus serves to test the irregular idiomatic combinability. The article shows how the irregular combinability causes context meaning shifts profiling peripheral semantic features of the main word or imposing on it an untypical and contradictory semantics. In irregular lexical combinations, the language representation changes due to the original authors reinterpretation of the referential situation. The irregular lexical combinations with intensifiers are thereafter a distinctive feature of Fyodor Dostoevskys individual writing style that reveals his original conceptualization of the world.

“No” and “net” as response tokens in English and Russian business discourse: In search of a functional equivalence

The literature on English suggests that turn-initial no fulfils a variety of discourse-pragmatic functions beyond its use as a negative response to polar questions. We cannot assume that the same range or distribution of functions is realised by its nearest Russian equivalent, net . Hence, investigating the contrasts and similarities in the nomenclature and distribution of functions of no and net should pose an important research problem for various discourses, and especially for business discourse with its focus on goal-orientation and productive interpersonal relations requiring adequate interlingual interaction. The study examines how no and net occur in two corpora of spoken business/professional discourse in order to establish their functional comparability and reveal the differences in their use. The article draws on data from the Cambridge and Nottingham Spoken Business English Corpus and the Russian National Corpus analysed using a combination of corpus linguistics, conversation analysis and discourse analytical approaches. Study results show some overlap between the functions of the response particles in English and Russian, and some differences. The findings suggest that no / net display a number of functions connected with conversational continuity, topic management, turn-taking and hedging. The distribution and functions of no/net in the English and Russian data are similar, with the Russian data showing a preference for floor-grabbing no -initiated turns. Translation equivalence is not always fully applicable between no and net . A mixed methodology generates results which suggest that fruitful insights can be gained from English and Russian corpus data. The issues of the use of no and нет in English and Russian business discourses can be further investigated using the suggested data and conclusions.

On the diachronic aspect of gestural communication

Modern studies of gesturing conclusively prove that a gestural communication system accompanies oral speech the units of which, like linguistic ones, can be described using a limited set of reproducible features assigned to certain classes and correlated with certain contexts of use. The diachronic aspect of gesturing has been little studied, although there is an understanding that human gesture behaviour, like speech, changes in space, time as well as under the influence of changing sociocultural conditions. Changes in the gestural system usually refer to innovations, the emergence of new gestures. It is much more difficult to describe the gestures that have gone or are going out of use since due to the lack of video recording they have to be restored from descriptions preserved in literature. Examples of gestures that have recently entered the Russian gestural system as well as examples of gestures that have gradually become obsolete are considered in this work. The data of the Multimodal Russian Corpus and some other corpora within the Russian National Corpus (RNC) used in this survey enable a clarification of the semantic and pragmatic characteristics of the gestures and changes in their use to be tracked.