CATEGORIZATION OF ADJECTIVES OF COLOR IN THE RUSSIAN POETICAL TEXTS (A CORPUS-BASED STUDY)

The paper describes certain quantitative data of usage of color adjectives in Russian poetic texts. We suggest methodology of revealing adjectives of color in the poetic corpus of the Russian National Corpus with the help of semantic tags. We have also compared frequency of adjectives of color in four corpora of the Russian National Corpus and found that frequency of adjectives of color in the poetic corpus is significantly higher than in other three corpora. Having analyzed 170 lemmas of adjectives of color retrieved from the texts of the poetic corpus, we have systematized these adjectives and suggested criteria of their typification. The paper presents quantitative data on the representation of suggested types of adjectives in Russian poetic texts. We have revealed a noticeable correlation between the frequency of eleven adjectives of color and evolutionary theory of basic color terms by Berlin and Kay.