The Uppsala Corpus: Short description

The Uppsala Corpus (Upsal'skij korpus russkix tekstov) consists of some 600 Russian texts with a total of one million running words (word tokens), equally divided between informative and literary prose. The informative texts are from between 1985 and 1989, while the literary texts, whose vocabulary does not date as quickly, cover a longer period, 1960-88. The corpus does not include poetry or drama.

Within the given frameword, considerable effort has been made to ensure as representative and varied a corpus as possible. The informative texts are drawn from 25 different subject areas: economics, foreign affairs / foreign policy, ideology / domestic policy, party matters, Soviet society, social issues, defence, education, law, history, culture, linguistics, medicine / health care, psychology, environment / ecology, agriculture, engineering, information technology, space research, energy, biology, geology / geography, physics, chemistry and sport. Certain areas which were felt to be more important are represented by a larger volume of texts.

The literary half of the corpus comprises work by the following 40 authors: Abramov, Ajtmatov, Astaf'ev, Baklanov, Bek, Belov, Bitov, Bondarev, Dubov, Ganin, Gladyshev, Granin, Grekova, Goncharov, Iskander, Kaverin, Kazakov, Kochnev, Kozhevnikova, Nagibin, Lixanov, Lidin, Paustovskij, Pogodin, Pristavkin, Troepol'skij, Rasputin, Shcherbakova, Simonov, Solouxin, Shmelev, Tendrjakov, Tokareva, Tolstaja, Trifonov, Vasil'ev, Vorobl'ev, Zalygin and Zorin. Here, too, there is unequal representation, with a larger amount of writing by the better-known authors.

For further details about the corpus, see Lönngren, Lennart (ed.), 1993. Chastotnyj slovar' sovremennogo russkogo jazyka. (A Frequency Dictionary of Modern Russian. With a Summary in English.) Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Studia Slavica Upsaliensia 32. 188 pp. Uppsala. ISBN 91-554-3134-8.

Distributor: Almqvist & Wiksell International, Box 4627, S-116 91 Stockholm

[Abstract]