Multilingual corpora in contrastive research on the vocative in Russian, Polish and Lithuanian

Abstract

The aim of this paper was to conduct a contrastive analysis of the vocative forms in Russian, Polish and Lithuanian, which was to be prefaced by a short introduction that would discuss the benefits of using non-commercial multilingual corpora in such research. Unfortunately, the quality of available corpora turned out to be insufficient to conduct this research properly. Consequently our core goal could not be met. Ultimately, we focused on assessing these corpora and indicating the reasons for which these corpora are effectively unusable in the contrastive studies on the use of the vocative. We indicate the issues related to the way in which the investigated corpora are build, which are the source of many abnormalities in alignment, morphosyntactic annotation and misinterpretation of the material of one language as another.

Keywords

• parallel corpora
• vocative case
• Polish
• Lithuanian
• Russian
• parallel corpora-illustrated approach