Russian idioms in dynamics: sources and preliminary results

The article presents the main areas of research within the framework of the project for the study of changes in the inventory of Russian idioms from the 19th to the 21st century, both in formal and semantic aspects. We discuss the lexicographic sources relevant for the project: both general explanatory dictionaries of the 18th–19th centuries and special ones focusing on various aspects of phraseology. We briefly describe and characterize the specifics of presenting information about idioms in every dictionary under discussion. The main data source for the project is the Russian National Corpus (RNC). Special attention is paid to the difficulties that accompany the study of nineteenth-century Russian idioms. These difficulties are due, firstly, to the limitations of corpus data. The RNC-data mostly consist of written texts. As for the 19th century, oral data do not exist in principle. Secondly, the linguistic intuition of modern Russian speakers differs from the nineteenth-century spoken practices. In this paper, we also analyze several idioms that demonstrate trends in the development of the Russian phraseology system.