Verbs denoting changes of colour: linguopragmatic analysis based on Russian National Corpus

The paper looks into the searching potential of Russian National Corpus (RNC). Investigating the lexical group with constant semantical and grammatical features, researchers are to rely on corpus search technologies, the corpus offering rather limited application. Lemmas and tags of RNC search don’t include colour as a search tag for verbs so this function is passed to the instruments referred to in the research suggested, for example, ‘Word at glance’. The service can be used to select lexical units featuring in homogeneous contexts, to establish their semantic proximity, and to determine semantical and grammatical characteristics applicable for the follow-up corpus inquiry. The study focuses on the verbs denoting changes of colour, their associative field, semantic proximity and combinability in collocations, grammatical and semantic features, suitable for regulating subsequent corpus queries. The findings clearly indicate that RNC is hardwired to recognize more criteria at the markup stage than those available for the lexical and grammatical search, and this outlines the perspectives for further corpus development.