Ongoing Trends in Usage of Active Present and Past Participles in the Russian Language (An Attempt at a Corpus-Based Study)

This research focuses on the general pattern of usage of full active present and past participles in contexts with present and past tense verbs in the modern Russian language. The National Corpus of the Russian Language provided the material to identify current trends in the use of such participles, as well as in formal external congruence of tenses between the participle and the verb. The statistical study demonstrated a number of changes in frequency (IPM) of present and past participles and of contexts where the verb and the participle agree or disagree in terms of explicitly marked tense, in the entire corpus and in certain subdivisions, especially during 2000–2022. It is concluded that in the modern Russian language, the frequency of past participles decreases, while that of present participles increases; in addition, since 2016 the frequency of contexts with a present tense verb and a present participle has noticeably increased, while the frequency of contexts with a past tense verb and a past participle has fallen rather low. It is also concluded that the pattern of usage of present and past participles in everyday speech and in journalism in 2000–2022 has been more similar to that found in advertising, technical, official, and academic texts, whereas in all-time statistics this pattern was more similar to that found in fiction. This phenomenon could be explained by the influence of extralinguistic factors. It is also noted that the obtained statistical data have the potential to be used in the functional-stylistic classification of texts.