Military Feminine Personal Nouns: A Corpus-Based Update to the Web Dictionary of Ukrainian Feminine Personal Nouns

Abstract

The paper investigates hundreds of newly coined feminine personal nouns from the military sphere and how corpus data can be used for their publication in online dictionaries. Particular attention is paid to the Web Dictionary of Ukrainian Feminine Personal Nouns (WDUF) (2022, published on r2u.org.ua) and the Alphabet of Feminine Personal Nouns, as well as their coverage of these lexical items in comparison with other dictionaries. The use of the General Regionally Annotated Corpus of Ukrainian (GRAC) in the selection of words, compilation of the dictionary entries and the frequency list of said words are presented. Due to semantic analysis, five lexico-semantic groups of military feminine terms are determined. For updating the WDUF, the author argues for the necessity of adding military subject labels to three of them. Using quantitative data from the corpus GRAC, a decision about the arrangement and quality of derivational alternatives among military feminine terms is drawn. These findings have affirmed the necessity to combine the approaches of traditional lexicography with the corpus-based ones, as well as to balance description with prescription.