Identification of the core and periphery of verbs of motion in the Russian language based on corpus data

The distribution of lexical units in texts is characterized by skewness and asymmetry due to the fact that they occur with different frequencies, so traditional descriptive statistics may not always be indicative when presenting vocabulary. The paper provides a brief overview of metrics that are used to describe high- and low-frequency units in different areas, with special attention paid to the rank average. The lexical and semantic group of verbs of motion well described in the literature, was chosen as the material for the study; however, the question of ordering units within it remains open. The author analysed the frequencies of about 900 lexical units from the dictionary “Lexical-semantic groups of Russian verbs” according to the National Corpus of the Russian language, which were then presented in the form of a frequency dictionary. Using the rank average, the core and peripheral parts of the list were identified. The core vocabulary makes up about 12.74 % of the total number of verbs described in the dictionary, while they account for about 70 % of all word usages. The meanings of high-frequency verbs imply the absence of direction of movement or, on the contrary, the presence of a final destination point. The results of the study may be in demand in language teaching, for example, in compiling lexical minimums.