Morphological criterion for distinguishing between abstract and concrete nouns: An experimental approach

Abstract

In this paper, the problem of using a morphological criterion for distinguishing between abstract nouns and other lexico-grammatical categories of the Russian language was studied. The experimental data were obtained as part of the work on compiling an electronic semantic dictionary of Russian abstract nouns with the help of the methodology used to create a similar dictionary for the English language. To date, the dictionary has had 1000 entries, each provided with the abstractness/concreteness index number. During the study, the nouns with the highest degree of abstractness (from 3.5 to 5) were selected. Based on the Large Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language by S.A. Kuznetsov and the Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language by D.N. Ushakov, the plural forms of these nouns and their usage were analyzed. It was revealed that the plural forms of the nouns under consideration can be used in at least one meaning. It was also discovered that the morphological criterion for distinguishing between the lexico-grammatical categories of concreteness/abstractness is not stable and, therefore, turns out to be inapplicable to a number of words.

Keywords

• abstract vocabulary
• nouns
• morphological criterion
• database
• semantic dictionary