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Appendix: Searching the Internet
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Appendix: Searching the Internet The publication of the column began before various language tools and resources became available on the Internet. As a result, the examples in the earlier columns were collected the old-‐‑fashioned way: through extensive reading with a pencil in hand. Later on, the Internet proved to be of great help not only for providing examples (using Uppsala corpus on Tusnelda: http:// www.sfb441.uni-tuebingen.de/tusnelda-engl.html, and now also Google http://www. google.com), but also for frequency of use analysis. Moshkov’s library on the web is another valuable resource: http://www.lib.ru. Of particular interest is the possibility of analyzing 19th century prose in order to see when a certain form appeared or disappeared from use. This is appreciably more precise than the old book and pencil method employed prior to the advent of the Internet. For example, Gorbachevich (1978: 64) puts the disappearance of -‐‑nu-‐‑ ‘change of state’ forms such as привыкнул, погибнул at the end of the 19th/beginning of the 20th century, while with the help of Moshkov’s library I was able to change the periodization; I was un-‐‑ able to find these -‐‑nu-‐‑ verbs in Turgenev or Dostoevsky, while I was able to find them in Lomonosov and Pushkin. Thus it makes sense to move the date of their disappearance to the mid-‐‑19th century. This is but one such example. I think it is worth explaining how to go about a Moshkov library search. While it is possible to use the “Find” command within any given text, it is better to use the Google search engine in order to search the whole library. Type the searched word and then the site, for example: погибнул: lib.ru. A combination of two or more words should be in quotation marks: «в этаже»: lib.ru. The search can be narrowed down as much as desired, for example limited to the classical literature: «в этаже»: az.lib.ru or to one author: привыкнул: http://az.lib.ru/t/tolstoj_lew_nikolaewich (one example of привыкнул as opposed to thirty-‐‑nine for привык on http://az.lib.ru/t/tolstoj_lew_nikolaewich). Tusnelda gives comprehensive instructions as to how to search the data base. And even though it is not as large or as comprehensive as Националь-‐‑ ный корпус русского языка http://www.ruscorpora.ru, it provide a larger context in the search returns and permits additional expansion of the context by moving the search target. It also allows the use of punctuation marks in searches. ...