A CORPUS-BASED ANALYSIS OF NUCLEUS AND PERIPHERY IN THE RUSSIAN LEXICO-SEMANTIC GROUP OF VERBS OF LOCOMOTION

Abstract

The article identifies the nucleus and periphery of the Russian lexico-semantic group of verbs of locomotion on corpus grounds. The material is the SynTagRus treebank of the Russian National Corpus (1,234,915 words, 733 documents), with the wordfreq database used for external validation. Thirty verbs sharing the archiseme of self-propelled movement are described by frequency, dispersion, subject combinability, semantic extension to inanimate subjects and derivational activity, and a nucleus index combining these criteria divides the group into four zones. The nucleus contains seven verbs (идти, ходить, бежать, двигаться, бегать, гулять, нестись) that account for 91.2% of all occurrences, while идти alone covers 56.0%. Frequency, dispersion and combinability correlate strongly (ρ from 0.88 to 0.93), derivational activity only moderately. The corpus nucleus does not coincide with the semantic hyperonym, and derivational families preserve traces of former centrality.