Idioms of Dostoevsky from the Perspective of the Present-Day Speaker of Russian

What is it about?

The paper discusses Dostoevsky’s individual style the way it is reflected by his use of idioms. The thesaurus of modern Russian idioms is compared with the set and use of idioms in the corpus of Dostoevsky’s texts. The study shows that the percentage of coverage of taxa of the thesaurus of modern idioms by idioms found in the Dostoevsky corpus is rather small (maximum coverage is about 44%). However, such coverage does not indicate significant quantitative changes in the composition of idioms in the lexicon over the past century and a half. No convincing correlation was found between the frequency of use of idioms within a taxon or cluster and their relative coverage. However, for some taxa such a relationship has been established. The high rank in the quantitative hierarchies of some taxa or clusters is explained by the importance of the corresponding semantic areas for Dostoevsky’s work. These include values, emotional states and thinking, consciousness... It is intriguing that the significance of these areas is also manifested in the sphere of phraseology.

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