THE CORPUS OF PARALLEL TEXTS AND CONTRASTIVE LEXICOLOGY

The aim of the present article is to attempt to determine the extent to which corpora of parallel texts can serve as a useful instrument for solving problems of contrastive linguistics; i.e., for describing peculiarities in the functioning of Russian forms compared with those of another language. The study is based on empirical data taken from the Russian-English/ English-Russian and Russian-German/German-Russian parallel corpora of the RNC. We focus on lexical phenomena of these pairs of languages, particularly cross-linguistic equivalence connected with the language- specific nature of certain lexemes and the means for representing them in bilingual dictionaries. The materials of the parallel corpora give rise to questions as to how cross-linguistic lexical correlates should be represented lexicographically, especially if these correspondences are not equivalent in a strict sense. Our analysis of lexical units that lack standard equivalents in other languages indicates that parallel corpora can help identify both the non-trivial semantic and discursive properties of such words and the peculiarities of their cross-linguistic functional correspondences.