A corpus-based study of adjectives that describe people

Abstract

The computer methods were used in this article to study attributive constructions, namely, Russian adjectives that combine with the words chelovek, muzhchina, zhenshchina. The research was based on the Google Books text corpus. Besides, the Open Corpora morphological dictionary was used to automatically determine parts of speech of the words that contain in the obtained word combinations. Approximately 17 thousand adjectives were identified and classified into five groups. The center and periphery of the colour palette of the studied colour adjectives were identified. The analysis of the adjectives describing appearance and physical parameters of a person revealed the most significant body parts. The obtained data also allowed making a frequency portrait of a typical man and woman of the 19th and 20th centuries. It was also revealed how age is represented by adjectives in the Russian texts. Analysis of the opinion adjectives showed the most significant traits of character attributed to the words under study. Adjectives that describe physical condition, emotional state and social status demonstrated the most typical ones for Russian written culture. All the adjectives were analysed in terms of frequency. It was shown that most often the adjectives combine with the generic word person. As for the nouns man and woman, there are adjectives that combine more often with woman and never with man and vice versa. The diachronic analysis of the adjectives showed how their use in combination with the nouns under study can change with time and how it can respond to significant historical events.