ИСТИНА

Corpus linguistics, or construction of various kinds of annotated balanced and representative linguistic databases – language corpora – has become recently a worldwide phenomenon in language and culture studies. Russian linguists have not remained aloof from the world's major trends, one might even state that they are pioneering very successfully in a number of major areas of the linguistic corpora construction activities. Thus, alongside with the foreign well-known corpora of the Russian language (i.e. Uppsala Corpus, HANCO Corpus, etc.), the Russian National Corpus (RNU) has become one of the most authoritative sources of information on the Russian language, its modern state and historical evolution, dialectal, regional and stylistic variety. The exceptional role of the language corpora is that they serve as unique reliable source of objective information on the actual functioning of a language. Corpus linguistics also provides new theoretical approach for research and education. According to Michael Halliday, “corpus linguistics re-unites the activities of language gathering and theorizing and argues that this is leading to a qualitative change in our understanding of language”. It is useful to note that basic knowledge and useful skills developed during construction of the Russian National Corpus ‘triggered’ various kinds of Russian linguists’ large-scale activity in the field of corpora building. At the moment researchers and educators have access to multiple Russian/other languages parallel corpora (Russian-Italian Parallel Corpus, Russian-Chinese Parallel Corpus, Russian Learner Translator Corpus, etc.), historic and Russian cultural heritage corpora (Corpus of Slavic Gospels, Russian Dialectal Corpus, Poetic Subcorpus of the Russian National Corpus, Corpus of Regional Media, etc.), specialized linguistic corpora such as Speech Corpus of Everyday Communication (annotated Russian speech recordings), Russian children’s Speech Corpus (CHILDES Project), Online Corpus of Russian Sign Language (RSL), Russian Emotional Corpus (REC), Corpus of Russian student texts, etc. In our presentation we will show examples from various Russian language corpora to discuss professional advantages and cultural benefits of linguistic corpora technology in comparison with the pre-computational and pre-corpora state-of-the-art in language research and language learning. We consider digital literacy in using linguistic corpora facilities for research and language learning as one of the primary targets in professional formation in Humanities in general and in linguistic education in particular. Role of corpora literacy as necessary cognitive component of modern research and education will be illustrated through examples from students’ research projects.