ИСТИНА

The paper discusses a general layout of “Human Characters” lexical database specifically developed to study the meanings of words from the semantic field of human character traits. It is intended as a resource providing a format for a comprehensive analysis of character words usage in different languages. A database with contexts from large modern corpora is considered a convenient tool for semantic analysis which offers such advantages as facilitating data storage and presentation, and keeping the analysis consistent while making changes possible at the same time. It is shown how several issues which significantly influence the analysis procedures are resolved in the pilot database version. These include identifying relevant contexts, describing features of a typical situation in which the character trait in question is exhibited, and comparing contextual meanings of the studied words. The suggested technique provides a more flexible tool for capturing similarities and differences between contexts within one language on the one hand, and gives ground for comparing the usage of translation equivalents on the other.