Assessment of comparative abstractness: Quantitative approach

Abstract

Copyright © 2020 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). Estimation of abstractness ratings of Russian words have remained almost entirely unexplored, though by contrast, a vast literature has addressed questions relating to the same notion in English. In this article we present the results of the experiment aimed at quantitative assessment of abstractness / concreteness of the top 1000 Russian words and contrasting their ratings with those of American English equivalents. We also performed a quantitative verification of abstractness ratings for polisemous words in Russian. The latter was conducted based on the survey results in which respondents were exposed to at least two collocations explicating separate senses of the word. Overall, our study reveals consistent similar patterns in respondents' ratings of concrete and abstract words in Russian and English. The findings of empirical dissimilarities in A/C ratings for different senses of one word validate the suggested method of presenting not single words but collocations. The results provide additional more fine-grained data on A/C ratings which could be employed as useful indicators of text complexity and features in a multi-factor text analysis.