Frequency of parametric adjectival functions in the newspaper sub-corpus of the National Corpus of the Russian language

Abstract

Modern linguistics assumes a comprehensive study of language as a means of forming and reflecting the picture of the world. In the course of communication, the transfer of information about an object is realized, among other things, through the use of parametric adjectives. A group of lexical units, united by the common semantics of size, acts as one of the main tools for describing reality. Based on the material of the newspaper sub-corpus of the National Corpus of the Russian Language, this article examines the frequency of parametric adjectives usage in political news texts. Functional and semantic specificity expands the sphere of parametric adjectives usage, which explains the prevalence of qualitative adjectives with the meaning of size. The aim of the study is to reveal the quantitative features of parametric adjectives usage in the newspaper sub-corpus of the National Corpus of the Russian Language. The study is based on the political texts from such newspapers as “The Pravda”, “The Novaya Gazeta”, “The Kommersant”, published from 2020 to 2024 and selected by the method of continuous sampling. In the course of the study, we gave a quantitative description of parametric adjectives with the meaning of size; on its basis, we rated the nominative fractionality and frequency of parametric adjectives’ thematic groups in the newspaper sub-corpus of the National Corpus of the Russian Language. As a result of the analysis of the most frequent parametric adjectives with the meaning of size, we determined and described the regularities of these lexical units usage in political news texts. This article reveals the reasons for the active use of parametric adjectives in the modern Russian language and their role in the process of collective consciousness formation.