DYNAMICS OF THE ARCHAISM KRAVA ACCORDING TO THE DATA OF THE RUSSIAN NATIONAL CORPUS

The article analyzes the information contained in the Russian National Corpus on the usage of the word krava (a plenophonic variant of the word korova ‘cow’) in different forms. The corpus data are used to test the hypothesis about activation of archaisms in modern poetry, starting from the second half of the twentieth century, after a long period of their inactivity. We compare the contexts of the Basic and Poetic corpora, while checking the representativeness of the information presented in them. The article also contains some contemporary materials that go beyond the chronological limits of the corpus data. The study has shown that the number of occurrences of diff erent forms of the word krava in both corpora is the same (19 and 19). Diff erent forms of the word krava in both corpora are used unevenly: nominative and genitive plural cases prevail. There are no forms of the Dative, Instrumental and Prepositional (local) singular and plural cases in both corpora. The texts of the XVIII–XX centuries in the Basic Corpus are mostly citational with reference to the Bible, while in the Poetic Corpus their extra-citational usage in archaized contexts is more frequent. The distribution chart of words with the root krav- in the Poetic Corpus, when homonymy is excluded (according to concordance data), shows a noticeable surge in the use of the form in the 1970s after its almost 140-year long absence (since 1840): three examples from the poetry of Victor Sosnora are recorded. Outside the Corpus there are also very interesting contexts with different forms of the word in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, for example, in the poetry of Alexei Shel’vakh and Igor Bulatovsky.