Lexical Features of Russian Prose of the First Third of the XX Century: the Case Study of Frequency Lists

The results of a study of the lexical features of Russian prose of the first third of the twentieth century, based on the material of the Corpus of Russian Story, are offered. The texts of 310 stories written by 300 different authors were automatically processed, lemmatized, sorted in accordance with the frequency distribution of the lemmas. In addition to the individual dictionaries of each story, general dictionaries were compiled, as well as dictionaries of separate periods (1900-1913, 1914-1922, 1923-1930) and the author’s gender. As a result of the study, it was possible to draw conclusions about the substantial similarity of the upper zones of the obtained frequency dictionaries, the most frequency words were highlighted. A comparative analysis with the Google Ngram Viewer and National Corpus of the Russian Language services showed that the distribution of frequency lists in short stories is generally stylistically determined and in some cases coincides with the general language trend. The key vocabulary of each time period was also extracted, and its categorization was carried out. The correlation between the historical period of writing stories and changes in key vocabulary is revealed.