A FREQUENCY DICTIONARY OF RUSSIAN VERBS BASED ON THE SYNTAGRUS TREEBANK
Keywords:
Frequency dictionary, Russian verbs, SynTagRus, corpus lexicography, dispersion, aspect, Zipf’s law, vocabulary coverage.Abstract
The article presents a frequency dictionary of Russian verbs compiled from the SynTagRus treebank of the Russian National Corpus (1,234,915 words, 733 documents) and describes the quantitative structure of the verbal lexicon. After the exclusion of 27 predicative words that the treebank tags as verbs, the dictionary contains 9,482 verb lemmas with 171,651 occurrences, which make up 13.90% of all words. For every lemma it records frequency, frequency per million, range, the dispersion coefficient DP and aspect. The distribution follows Zipf’s law with a slope of −0.83 for the first thousand ranks. 251 lemmas cover half of all verb occurrences, 1,290 cover 80% and 2,650 cover 90%, while 30.5% of lemmas occur only once. Imperfective verbs account for 53.8% of tokens but only 48.4% of lemmas. Dispersion analysis shows that only 19 verbs are evenly distributed across the corpus. The results agree with an independent multi-source frequency list (ρ = 0.816 for the top 200 verbs) and can be used in learner’s lexicography and in teaching Russian as a foreign language.
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