THE DIACHRONIC ASPECT OF THE SEMANTICS OF THE ADJECTIVE ‘RED’ IN RUSSIAN POETIC TEXTS: A CORPUS STUDY

The semantics of the Russian adjective красный (red) is analyzed. The study was performed on the base of subcorpora of the Russian National Corpus (RNC). We built hierarchic classifi cation scheme of the meanings of the adjective which are illustrated with examples from the corpus. The juxtaposition of frequency of usage of meanings in the main and poetry corpora showed the signifi cant diff erences in frequencies in  18th and 19th centuries. The diff erences between poetical and prosaic text in 20th are less noticeable. The ranks of general frequencies of meanings are diff erent from ranks when grading to frequencies of collocations of adjective. We also revealed features, which are typical in any classifi cation scheme, a context of the usage can be assigned to more than one class. We can trace some cases of semantic transformations of some collocations of adjective красный (red).