2025 Vol. 16 №1

Сolour terms in the Russian short stories of the early XX and XXI centuries: a corpus study

DOI

10.5922/2225-5346-2025-1-4

Pages

59-73

Abstract

The paper presents a comparative analysis of colour terms frequencies in the Russian short stories of the early 20th and 21st centuries. The study draws on the Russian Short Sto­ries Corpus 1900—1930, word frequency lists compiled from the stories by particular authors (Ivan Bunin, Alexander Kuprin, Anton Chekhov, Leonid Andreev), and the Russian National Corpus. Two major statistic parameters are used, i. e. relative frequency (ipm) and rank dis­tribution. The study focusses on the most common colour terms. A multifold comparison has revealed differences due to the author’s personality, historical context, and literary form. Thus, considerable divergence is shown to exist in the individual writers’ preferences for the particular colour terms. However, the differences come down to a unified rank distribution in a sample from the Russian Short Story Corpus 1900—1930, containing stories by a few hun­dred authors. While not affecting the intra-group rankings of colour terms, the turbulent his­torical events seem to have spurred their ipm index. A hypothesis is put forward to account for this, based on an earlier paper. The analysis of the 21st century material draws on a sample from the Russian National Corpus, containing short stories produced in 2000—2023. A com­parison between the two samples has shown that the most frequent adjectives have retained their intra-group rankings while the ipm index has largely dropped. Included in the paper is also a comparison between Ivan Bunin’s short stories and poetry, exemplifying the impact of literary form on the colour terms’ frequencies.

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