“Dictionary of the Language of Russian Poetry (20th Century)” in the Context of Digital Author Dictionary

The paper deals with the conception of the “Dictionary of the language of Russian poetry (20th сentury)” in the context of digital lexicography. The dictionary is a summary explanatory concordance, which contains all the contexts from the selected sources — works of ten poets who worked mostly in the period of the Silver Age of Russian Poetry. These contexts illustrate all the lexemes used (including function words and proper names). Unlike traditional concordances, the dictionary contains not just individual lines but entire contexts, complete with commentary when necessary, while dictionary entries include an optional multifunctional meaning zone, which provides interpretation (for obscure words), morphological characteristics, stylistic markings and other important linguistic information. Thus, the dictionary not just offers a cross-section of the poetic usage of the epoch in question but makes sure that it is presented in a linguistically analyzed form, making the dictionary an informative source for both researchers and non-specialists. The dictionary is based on the ideas of V. P. Grigor’ev who more than half a century ago argued that the lexicographic representation of the poetic language is of great importance for the study of the national language and regarded the use of digital methods as a promising way to develop the author lexicography. Work on “The Dictionary of the Language of Russian poetry (20th сentury)” started in the 1990s when development of electronic resources made it possible to work with large arrays of texts. The compilation of the dictionary was essentially carried out side by side with the emergence and development of digital methods and corpus linguistics (in particular, creation of the Russian National Corpus). Thus, the dictionary makes it possible to comprehend the trends of digitalization of the author lexicography in a historical perspective. The publication provides examples illustrating different stages of work on the dictionary: from preliminary computer text processing to ready-made dictionary entries. The diffi culties facing the compiler of the dictionary and ways to overcome them are analyzed.