Глагол вскричать: всегда ли права статистика?
The verb is a cry: is it always right statistics?

Summary/Abstract: The present study focuses on a single Russian verb вскричать. This verb was the object of statistical analysis of lexical vocabulary changes in 19th-century Russian prose by A. Shaikevich (2013). His paper presents the results of the analysis of small historical corpora. The size of the corpus is about 25 million words. Shaikevich’s statistical data have shown that this verb had almost disappeared by the end of the 19th century. In our study, the analysis of the historical and modern usage of the verb вскричать was done with the help of the large Russian National Corpus (230 million words), and all the examples were taken from 19th- and 20th-century texts. Our analysis has shown that this verb was very frequent in the language of some writers (e.g. F. Dostoyevsky), while L. Tolstoy did not use it at all. In the 20th century, the verb вскричать became quite frequent again for numerous writers. In recent times, poets and journalists have also used it as a marked stylistic device.

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