RUSSIAN NATIONAL CORPUS IN TEACHING THE USE OF RUSSIAN DIMINUTIVES
The article presents an analysis of the semantic potential of the Russian diminutive in teaching Russian as a foreing language. The analysis is based on the materials of the Russian National Corpus. The study puts the heuristic potential of corpus usage into the practical perspective in foreign language teaching. By means of method of textual analysis we discover new aspects in the interpretation of sematic and functional variation of the Russian diminutive: its usage for creating a special emotional and evaluative background of Russian speech. The analysis of additional meanings that appear in Russian translations in parallel corpora helps establish equivalents that reveal the specificity of the Russian diminutive.