The Usual and the Unusual in Ordinary Language

Corpus research technically resembles sociological research and makes it possible to identify correlations and trends in the use of figures of speech and thought in various human cultures. Frequencies of collocations of the Russian adjectives ‘obychnyj’, ‘obyknovennyj’, ‘privychnyj’, ‘obydennyj’ and ‘obychajnyj’ (all of them mean “ordinary, usual, habitual, daily”) and their cognates in the corpus of the Russian language are compared, similarities and differences in the use of the English and the Russian phrase meaning “ordinary language” are revealed. Etymologically, the Russian ‘obydennyj’ means “existing only one day” which was later replaced by “unremarkable and not creative”. Which is why, unlike the English ‘ordinary man’, the Russian term ‘obydennyj’ is only metaphorically and very rarely used in collocations like ‘ordinary humans’. Nevertheless, ‘ordinary language’ as a philosophical term with a long tradition is commonly translated into Russian as ‘obydennyj jazyk’. This study of semantically similar lexical items and their negative forms, in the Russian corpus relies on comparing their frequencies at the absolute beginning and the absolute end of the sentences, as well as on statistics of their left and right contexts. Special attention is payed to collocations of these lexical items in Russian texts. Some regularities of the use of negative/positive forms from the point of view of the functional sentence perspective are investigated.