EXPERIENCE OF CREATING AN ONLINE RESOURCE FOR LINGUISTIC COMMENTARY (THE FATALIST BY M. LERMONTOV)

The paper describes a new electronic resource designed for creating linguistic commentary of texts. It focuses on the novel “The Fatalist” by Mikhail Lermontov, a Russian literary text of the 19th century. However, the commentary’s scope goes far beyond the limits of one piece. It presents an attempt to describe the lexico-semantic and morphosyntactic shifts that occurred in Russian language after the 19th century, to identify their origins, causes, and sometimes typological parallels. These shifts are discovered through the analysis of Lermontov’s text, but since many of them are far from being obvious to a modern native speaker, they are subsequently verifi ed on the Russian National Corpus data. The functionality developed for the resource takes into account the needs of both the readers (above all, high school students and teachers, as the primary target audience of the resource), and the commentators. Taken together, these features make the project fundamentally diff erent from the other broadly comparable resources, like dictionaries (which are not tied to a specifi c text and pay little attention to grammar, or diachrony), literary commentaries (usually free from properly linguistic analysis), linguistic corpora (which contain no full-text comments), etc.