A corpus-based study of English loanwords on ‑ing in Russian (2000-2011)

Abstract

Until recently, large corpora of Russian had been lacking. This changed with the development of the Russian National Corpus (RNC) and the appearance of Integrum, a large commercial database that has shown to be a valuable tool for linguistic studies.

            We have used both corpora to study the actual use of recent loanwords in Russian that have their origin in English ‑ing forms, such as rejting (rating) and kasting (casting). The RNC was used to compile a list of ‑ing words and their frequency. Integrum provided the data for a qualitative analysis of the semantics and possible developments between 2000 and 2011 of five ‑ing words. We also tried to use the corpora to study the changes in popularity of ‑ing words over time, which was possible to some extent. This corpus-based study of ‑ing words illustrates both possibilities and limitations of the two largest corpora for Russian, RNC and Integrum.