Russian Feminitives on Social Media: A Corpus-Aided Approach for Their Analysis

This chapter presents ongoing research on the frequency of use of Russian feminine nouns. In the recent past, feminine nouns have been widely used in the Russian media. However, contemporary feminine noun models are  difficult to find in Russian dictionaries. The first stage of the experiment is to identify productive word-formation models of feminine nouns. We use Sketch Engine and NoSketch Engine corpus systems, the General Internet Corpus of Russian, as well as the method of distributional and statistical analysis. Furthermore, Student’s t-test is used to check if the models are interchangeable. The final stage of the research is the automatic creation of semantic fields for lemmata with different feminine suffixes. Our chapter provides insight into discussions regarding the use of Russian feminine nouns, in terms of both the language rules and the prescribed usage.