Database of Russian Impersonal Verbal Constructions

This article presents the Database of Russian Impersonal Verbal Constructions that has been developed to support a linguistic research of Russian impersonal verbal construction as mirrored in translations into other languages. This information resource was developed based on the concept of Supracorpora Databases (SCDBs). Translation correspondences in the Database of Russian Impersonal Verbal Constructions are presented as ordered pairs that combine formal descriptions of corresponding lexical-grammatical forms found in source and target texts of a parallel corpus. The paper also provides description of the methodology for creation of translation correspondences in the database. Some of the problems related to the task of finding Russian impersonal verbal constructions in corpora are considered and approaches to solving those problems are proposed. Thanks to integrated search and statistical functions, the Database of Russian Impersonal Verbal Constructions and other SCDBs significantly extend capabilities of linguistic experts using corpus-based methods to analyze specific linguistic items, both independently and in contrast with other languages.