CHANGE IN THE STYLISTIC STATUS OF WORDS BASED ON CORPUS DATA

The article discusses changes in the stylistic status of colloquial vocabulary in the Russian language based on academic explanatory dictionaries, starting from “Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language” edited by D. N. Ushakov and ending with “Academic Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language” edited by L. P. Krysin. Stylistic labels in the dictionaries for the units under consideration (such as blat ‘connections’, bordovyj ‘burgundy’, vyshibala ‘bouncer’, etc.) are compared with the data on theusage dynamics of these words in the Russian National Corpus. Two opposing tendencies are analyzed: 1) the increase in the stylistic status of a lexical unit, correlated with its increased frequency of use, and 2) the decrease in its stylistic status, correlated with a decrease in its usage. The use of corpus data can be particularly productive in determining the stylistic colouring of word-forming doublets, where one of them becomes peripheral and gets a lower stylistic colouring, while the other becomes neutral (e. g. vperekor/ naperekor ‘against’, obkatit/okatit ‘to spray’, volosastyj/volosatyj ‘hairy’). It is important to consider other factors that infl uence the stylistic colouring of a word, such as the means of word formation (e. g. mobil’nik ‘mobile phone’, zachyotka ‘record book’) and the association of a word with a certain functional style (e.g. beshoznyj/beshozyajnyj ‘ownerless’, otmyvanie ‘laundering’). In such debatable cases, lexicographers may use auxiliary methods to verify stylistic labels, such as conducting surveys among educated native speakers of the language.