Russian feminitives: what can corpus data tell us?

Recent years have seen considerable debate concerning Russian feminitives, i.e. derived formations that designate female professionals, such as advokatka, advokatša, advokatessa, ženščina-advokat or advokat-ženščina that all refer to female lawyers. In this article, we investigate the use of feminitives based on data from the Araneum Russicum Maximum corpus and the Russian National Corpus. It is shown that the choice of feminitive to some extent depends on the morphophonological properties of the base word. It is furthermore argued that suffixed feminitives are more frequent than compounds like ženščina-advokat and advokat-ženščina, and that the distribution has changed over time. Suffixed feminitives reveal a stronger tendency to combine with gender-related epithets (e.g., obajatel’naja agentka ‘charming agent’), while the type ženščina-X is frequently used with the epithet pervyj ‘first’. Our article is an empirical study of the actual use of feminitives in corpus data, which we hope will inform future metalinguistic discussion and prescriptivist thinking about feminitives in Russian

An application of graph theory to linguistic complexity

This article introduces a new measure of linguistic complexity which is based on the dual nature of the linguistic sign. Complexity is analyzed as consisting of three components, namely the conceptual complexity (complexity of the signified), the formal complexity (complexity of the signifier) and the form-meaning correspondence complexity. I describe a way of plotting the form-meaning relationship on a graph with two tiers (the form tier and the meaning tier) and apply a complexity measure from graph theory (average vertex degree) to assess the complexity of such graphs. The proposed method is illustrated by estimating the complexity of full noun phrases (determiner + adjective + noun) in English, Swedish, and German. I also mention the limitations and the problems which might arise when using this method

Corpus-based topic modeling for the cognitive study of the 21st centurysociocultural challenges

The results were obtained in the course of a two-stage study. At the first stage (2018) linguists analyzed the conceptualdomain sociocultural challenges on the basis of purposely elaborated Russian language THREAT-corpus (10.4 m words)and built a frame of the domain. At the second stage (2018-2019) the research was carried out with methods of automatedtopic modeling for two Russian language corpora: THREAT-corpus and alternative corpus collected using WebBootCaTtool in the SketchEngine corpus management system. Methods of topic modeling (PLSA, LDA, BigARTM et al.) allowedeliciting thematic profiles for texts of both corpora. Comparison of two datasets was carried out by applying set theory,graph theory, and probabilistic analysis. Combining topic modeling with linguistic frame analysis resulted in more pre-cise configurations of cognitive models in the conceptual domain sociocultural challenges. Word frequency for lexemesmanifesting sociocultural challenges proved to be an important factor of conceptual structures representation

Note sul verbo běžati in slavo orientale antico

The paper deals with the verb běžati (‘to run away’) and its aspectual behaviours in the Early East Slavic language. The use of the aorist and past participle confirms that in the Early East Slavic documents of the 11th‒14th centuries (taken from the Old Russian subcorpus of the RNC) the verb was used in perfective contexts, but some forms of present participle, simple present and imperfect attested in the documents are discussed in order to show the aspectual indefiniteness of this ver