Linguistic corpus “Tomsk regional text”: theoretical and methodological background of the project

Modern linguistics actively solves the fundamental problem of describing the internal nomenclature using the technology computer science developed in data collection, information storage and display, i.e. the technology of linguistic corpus creation, storage technology of databases and data recovery. Currently, projects of national language representation in general are successfully implemented. The Russian National Corpus was created by a big team of linguists and specialists of Yandex search engine. The range of empirical data presented in the Corpus is broad, but not exhaustive: the problem of representation of regional variants of the national language, different social and territorial features has not been solved. In this regard, Russian linguists face an urgent problem of finding the theoretical and methodological grounds and conceptual solutions for creating linguistic corpuses representing regional variants of the Russian language. Domestic studies of the regional variations of language functioning suggest that currently there has been collected a significant linguistic material on the specifics of the linguocultural state of the regions. Regional linguistics originates at the junction of the classical studies of dialectology and the language of the city. A number of researchers of the current dialect state consider the acute problem of dialect destruction and the emergence of a new form of language which occupies an intermediate position between the dialect and the national language: the regiolect; the latter becomes the object of regional linguistics. The study of this form of language involves considerable empirical evidence which can be obtained only with the hepl of novel technical solutions based on full-text databases and linguistic corpuses. Tomsk Oblast, like other regions of Russia, has a number of specific features that have emerged due to the historical and cultural conditions of its development which determined the synthetic nature of the Siberian cultural space. Now the territory of Tomsk Oblast is inhabited by representatives of more than 120 nationalities. One of the significant elements of culture and preservation of the national and cultural identity is language; its cultural significance is confirmed by the public understanding of the need to study the national languages. The linguistic specificity of Tomsk Oblast is closely related to the geopolitical and historical processes of this territory’s settlement by representatives of various ethnic groups, as well as to the mixed and varied composition of dialects of the Russian population. The regional version of the Russian language in Tomsk Oblast has never become a subject of a separate linguistic description, so the proposed project aims at a comprehensive study of its system. The conceptual design of the linguistic corpus reflecting the specificity of the regional variant of the Russian language calls for the evolution of the system principles of the linguistic-anthropological portraiture of the region.

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