Russian Corpus Research Articles

АГАТ-СЕМАНТИКА: СЕМАНТИЧНЕ РОЗМІЧУВАННЯ КОРПУСУ УКРАЇНСЬКОЇ МОВИ

The article views linguistic aspects of semantic markup of the Ukrainian Corpus as the fourth stage of presenting information about Corpus units. The markup is based on taxonomic classification of the Russian Corpus but with extra modifica- tion. There was developed the software tools for online work based on materials of frequency dictionary of journalistic style with a total volume of 40,000 lexemes compiled from the sampling of 16 Million word forms of Ukrainian texts.

The corpus of Tibetan grammatical works

This paper describes the creation of the parallel Tibetan---Russian corpus of works of the Tibetan grammatical tradition that formed in the 7---8th centuries AD. On the basis of the corpus, a special lexical base of grammatical terminology is formed that could be of interest for Tibetologists and specialists in general linguistics. The corpus can be used for linguistic research, teaching, and the study of the classical and modern Tibetan language, as well as the Tibetan grammatical tradition.

The Statistic Verification of a Semantically Based Hypotheses: Russian Verbs of Volition: and

This paper investigates the semantic distribution of two morphological forms of the Russian verb of volition хотеть. Three hypotheses for semantic grounds for the grammatical distribution are proposed. The hypotheses are checked by statistical analysis of distribution of the infinitive made on the data obtained from the National Russian Corpus. The analysis reveals groups of verbs which show more deviation in their behavior when used with one of the volition verbs than would be expected. The results of the analysis do not favor any of the preliminary hypotheses. A close-up look at the semantics of the constructions with the infinitives that show non-standard behavior helps to understand the semantic opposition realized by the two constructions.

The Russian Language Text Corpus for Testing Algorithms of Topic Model

This paper describes the process of creating Russian language text corpus which is specialized for testing algorithms of probabilistic topic model. The articles of Wikinews licensed by Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic (CC BY 2.5) were used as a source of texts for corpus. The stage of text's preprocessing and markup are described in the conclusion. We proposed an original markup of text corpus for testing algorithms of topic modeling.

Towards Automatic Text Adaptation in Russian

This article describes ways of using original texts in the National Russian Corpus and news texts to teach Russian as a foreign language. The two-year work of a scientific group from the Higher School of Economics (from Nizhny Novgorod and Moscow), called CorpLings was analyzed. Special attention was paid to the automatic adaptation of acute news texts, which was the basic principle of the research part of the project. We also describe ways of simplifying syntactical and morphological structures that may seem difficult for students at an elementary level. The stages used for lexical simplification are described in detail, such as the creation of an algorithm to find the most appropriate synonyms based on morphological rules, and an analysis of the statistical model of words’ contextual proximity. This article also addresses the difficulties faced by developers and the final results of our research.

Distortion in Screening and Spatial Preferences

This article describes ways to use original texts in the National Russian Corpus as well as news texts for teaching Russian as a foreign language. Two-year work of a scientific group of Higher School of Economics (Nizhny Novgorod-Moscow), which is called CorpLings is analyzed. Special attention is paid to the basic principles of research part of the project – automatic adaptation of acute news texts. We also describe ways to simplify structures, which seem difficult for students at the elementary level, from the point of view of their syntactic and morphological structure. Stages, needed for lexical simplification are described in detail. Among them there are creation of an algorithm to find the most appropriate synonyms, based on morphological rules, and analysis of a statistical model of contextual proximity of words. The article also addresses the difficulties faced by developers and the final result of research.

Многофакторный анализ русской стихийной имперсональной конструкции

The adversity impersonal construction involves two arguments: an accusative and an instrumental. The order of these two elements is investigated with the help of 669 examples taken from a Russian corpus, and the analysis shows that the primary determinants of the word order are the pronominality of the accusative argument and the length difference between the arguments. These results are consistent with the idea that fast recognition of the sentential structure is a primary factor in sentence processing. A less influential, but still significant, variable is the animacy of the accusative—when the accusative is animate it is more prone to precede the instrumental argument. This finding shows that animacy directly affects word order in Russian.

Указание большим пальцем: основные лингвистические функции <br>(The linguistic functions of thumb pointing)

This study analyzes the main linguistic meanings of thumb pointing in Russian. The author uses A. Kendon's methodology as a basis and supplements it with statistical analysis and with data from the Multimodal Russian Corpus (MURCO). The main functions of thumb pointing in Russian include the anaphoric function, functions of activation and alienation of the pointed object, and the contrasting function.

Zur Struktur der Rechtfertigung (dargestellt an russischen und tschechischen literarischen Beispielen)

Abstract In the present paper, I describe the argumentative structure of justifications. Justifications are typical reactions to a reproach. With a reproach a speaker expresses a negative evaluation of an action of the counterpart. This negative evaluation is usually based on a common norm. The justification aims to a different, positive evaluation of this action by referring to a norm, from which the speaker presumes to stand above the reference norm of the reproach. The justification is successful when this assumption is also accepted by the one, who uttered the reproach. The argumentative structure can be described as a syllogism with an argument and a conclusion, which is based on an assumption or basis-conditional. It can be shown for a Russian and Czech literary corpus that common argumentation schemes, which remind of classical Grecian topoi, are often used in justifications.

Russian Emotion Vocabulary in American Learners’ Narratives

This study compared the uses of emotion vocabulary in narratives elicited from monolingual speakers of Russian and English and advanced American learners of Russian. Monolingual speakers differed significantly in the distribution of emotion terms across morphosyntactic categories: English speakers favored an adjectival pattern of emotion description, and Russian speakers a verbal one. Advanced American learners of Russian shifted from the adjectival to the verbal pattern in Russian and thus began approximating the usage of native speakers of Russian. At the same time, the data revealed 6 areas where learner usage differed from the monolingual Russian corpus: morphosyntactic transfer from the first language (L1), semantic transfer from the L1, greater use of adverbial constructions, absence of a language‐specific verb frequently used by native Russian speakers, violations of appropriateness of sociolinguistic register, and a significantly lower proportion of emotion word tokens.

Looking at the overlooked: A corpora study of punctuation use in Russian and English1

This study was designed to analyze the comparative use of punctuation marks in Russian and English newspaper editorials. The study was conducted using corpora of English-language editorials, taken from the New York Times in 2005, and of Russian-language editorials, taken from Izvestiia in the same year. Results indicated that the comma, colon, and the em-dash were used more often in the Russian corpus. The difference was determined to be statistically significant. The author then compared these results to the results of punctuation use in corpora of Russian and English literary texts. Again these punctuation marks were used more frequently in the Russian literary corpus than in the English one. At the same time, in both the Russian and English literary corpora these marks were used much more frequently than in the corpora of Russian and English editorials. In the second part of the article, the author attempts to isolate the reasons for the discrepancy in use of the colon by examining rules for its use as elaborated in authoritative Russian and English style guides. On the basis of this, the author suggests guidelines for the translation of the colon into English.

Towards a semasiological account of evidentials: An enunciative approach of -er in Modern Western Armenian

Modern Western Armenian has a so-called ‘evidential’ marker, similar to that found in Albanian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, and Turkish. Descriptions of this category usually involve the concept of ‘the source of knowledge’, analyzing the evidential both in discursive terms (second-hand information) and in logical terms (inference, abduction, deduction). A contrastive analysis of Russian corpus data (Bonnot et al., 1997) revealed striking similarities between the semantic values of evidentially marked utterances in Armenian and those of certain Russian utterances which are marked by specific stress patterns. My and Bonnot's study also showed that the admirative value is more central than other pragmatic values, as showed by Baştürk et al. (1996) and DeLancey (1997). In this paper, we analyze a corpus of spontaneous speech to show that the basic value of this so-called evidential marker is, in fact, modal. We describe the particular type of modality involved in enunciative terms, which enables us to account all its pragmatic values, regardless of whether they are ‘typical’ (admirative, inferential, hearsay), ‘marginal’, discursive, or contextual (causal, argumentative, prescriptive, free indirect speech, and so on). Our theoretical claims gain support from intonational phenomena as well as constraints on the utterances' rhematic structure. All in all, we believe such a modal interpretation to be superior to the cognitive interpretation, that centers on ‘the source of knowledge’.