TY - JOUR

T1 - Mapping word frequencies in fiction on sociopolitical context: the case of early 20th century Russian short stories

AU - Grebennikov, A.O.

AU - Marusenko, N.M.

AU - Skrebtsova, T.G.

N1 - : A.O. Grebennikov, N.M. Marusenko, T.G. Skrebtsova, Mapping word frequencies in fiction on sociopolitical context: the case of early 20th century Russian short stories, Terra Linguistica, 14 (1) (2023) 21–29. DOI: 10.18721/JHSS.14103

PY - 2023/3

Y1 - 2023/3

N2 - The paper deals with the language of Russian short stories written in the period from1900–1930. It is based on the Russian Short Stories Corpus, an ongoing research project aimed tocollect, digitally process, and present the Russian literature of the early 20th century in an electronicform. The Corpus contains the stories written by thousands of Russian authors, both well-knownand almost forgotten ones. From the corpus, a sample was taken to serve as a testbed for linguists,lexicographers and literary scholars, enabling them to check their intuitions concerning the languageand style of the epoch. The sample has been divided into three subsamples along the lines set by thedramatic turns of Russian history. The first subsample contains the stories produced from the onsetof the 20th century up to WWI (1900–1913), the second one refers to the tumultuous period of warsand revolutions (1914–1922), and the third accounts for the stories written in the Soviet Union(1923–1930). The Corpus has proved instrumental in detecting manifold changes in language use,including grammar, vocabulary, syntactic patterns, collocations, and stylistics. In the present paper,frequency-sorted word lists are used to bring out relevant changes in Russian vocabulary, linking themto the sociopolitical context. The results obtained will provide valuable data for the lexicographerscompiling Russian dictionaries of the above-mentioned period.

AB - The paper deals with the language of Russian short stories written in the period from1900–1930. It is based on the Russian Short Stories Corpus, an ongoing research project aimed tocollect, digitally process, and present the Russian literature of the early 20th century in an electronicform. The Corpus contains the stories written by thousands of Russian authors, both well-knownand almost forgotten ones. From the corpus, a sample was taken to serve as a testbed for linguists,lexicographers and literary scholars, enabling them to check their intuitions concerning the languageand style of the epoch. The sample has been divided into three subsamples along the lines set by thedramatic turns of Russian history. The first subsample contains the stories produced from the onsetof the 20th century up to WWI (1900–1913), the second one refers to the tumultuous period of warsand revolutions (1914–1922), and the third accounts for the stories written in the Soviet Union(1923–1930). The Corpus has proved instrumental in detecting manifold changes in language use,including grammar, vocabulary, syntactic patterns, collocations, and stylistics. In the present paper,frequency-sorted word lists are used to bring out relevant changes in Russian vocabulary, linking themto the sociopolitical context. The results obtained will provide valuable data for the lexicographerscompiling Russian dictionaries of the above-mentioned period.

KW - Russian short stories

KW - text corpus

KW - frequency dictionary

KW - Russian lexicography

KW - stylometry

UR - https://human.spbstu.ru/userfiles/files/volume/TL_1_2023.pdf

M3 - Article

VL - 14

SP - 21

EP - 30

JO - Terra Linguistica

JF - Terra Linguistica

SN - 2782-5450

IS - 1

ER -