Difficulties of corpus research of conditional constructions (on the material of Chinese and Russian languages)

A corpus study is an important step in examining word combinations and how they are used in different types of sentences. However, corpus data do not always fully reflect the peculiarities of word usage due to difficulties in interpreting context and determining the speaker's intention, because it is difficult to interpret the context and determine a communicative intention of the speaker. This problem is particularly noticeable in the study of Chinese conditionals. This is the research subject of this paper. To understand how Chinese conditional constructions are used and how regularly they occur in speech, linguists rely on data from foreign language corpora. Nevertheless, despite all the convenience, users have to face certain problems when analysing words and, mainly, collocations. The main purpose is to present four issues related to using BCC corpus (Beijing Language and Culture University corpus) and CCL corpus (Centre for Chinese Linguistics of Peking University corpus) to analyse conditional constructions. The problems were considered by searching words and their combinations. To compare search mechanisms in different language corpora, we use the data from the Russian National Corpus. According to results of the research the usage of Chinese corpora requires great care. Today these sources are poorly researched as they are used by researchers with intermediate and advanced levels. The researchers mostly include sinologists, orientalists or translators from and into Chinese. Hence, the scientific novelty of the study lies in outlining the difficulties that may arise when researching examples of Chinese sentences in corpus search. The study has shown that the use of Chinese corpora requires more care than the Russian National Corpus.

the Chinese language, the Russian language, corpus, corpus research, condition, constructions, conditionals, difficulties, problems, relevance