Idioms Database: Evidence from Nineteenth-Century Russian Texts

What is it about?

The article presents the main areas of research within the framework of the project for the study of Russian idioms of the nineteenth century and their development trend. We discuss the lexicographic sources relevant for the project: both general explanatory dictionaries of the eighteenth-nineteenth centuries and special ones focusing on the various aspects of phraseology.We briefly describe and characterize the specific features of representing information about idioms in every dictionary under discussion. The source of corpus data for the project is the Russian National Corpus (RNC). Special attention is paid to difficulties that accompany the study of Russian idioms of the nineteenth century. These difficulties are associated, firstly, with the limitations of corpus data. The RNC-data mostly consist of written texts. As for the nineteenth century, the oral data do not exist in principle. Secondly, the linguistic intuition of modern Russian speakers differs from the speech practices of the nineteenth century. The study aims at determining various changes in the inventory of Russian idioms from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, their dynamics in form and meaning. In this paper, we also analyze several idioms that demonstrate the development of the Russian phraseology system.

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