The Dynamics of Vocabulary in Russian Prose (Based on Frequency Dictionaries of the Corpus of Russian Short Stories 1900-1930)

Abstract

The paper presents the results of a study that is part of a large-scale project aimed at studying the changes that took place in the Russian language during the first three decades of the 20th century. In the history of Russia, this period was marked by stormy events that led to a radical change in the state system and the formation of a new society. To quantify the scale of changes that occurred in the language in the result of these dramatic events, it is necessary to analyze the representative volume of linguistic data and to compare different chronological periods in dynamics using quantitative methods. The research was carried out on the data of an annotated sample from the Corpus of the Russian Short Stories of 1900-1930, which contains texts by 300 Russian writers. All the texts in the Corpus are divided into three time frames: 1) the pre-war period (1900)(1901)(1902)(1903)(1904)(1905)(1906)(1907)(1908)(1909)(1910)(1911)(1912)(1913), 2) the war and revolutionary years (1914)(1915)(1916)(1917)(1918)(1919)(1920)(1921)(1922) and 3) the early Soviet period (1923)(1924)(1925)(1926)(1927)(1928)(1929)(1930). Frequency distribution of significant vocabulary in dynamics was analyzed, which made it possible to identify the main tendencies in the change of individual words and lexical groups frequencies from one historical period to another and to correlate them with the previously identified dynamics of literary themes. The technique used allows to trace the influence of large-scale political changes on the vocabulary of literary language, to note the peculiarities and tendencies of the writers' worldview in a certain historical period, and also makes it possible to significantly supplement the analysis of the dynamics of literary themes in fiction.