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Dictionary as an instrument of linguistic research
In recent years, online dictionaries have undergone a real boom; however, they are targeting general user rather than a linguist. While general public is indeed the main user of online dictionaries, there is dire need for linguists to have access to specialized
search options which are necessary for their research but are not provided by commercial type online dictionaries. In this respect, dictionaries are well behind linguistic corpora that have been used as instruments of linguistic research for decades now. Russian lexicography is no exception in this respect; it does however, possess highly developed theoretical resources in the form of the Active dictionary of Russian (ADR), a project developed and supervised by Ju.D. Apresjan. ADR provides highly detailed descriptions of lexical items that are easily convertivle into a database with a rich search system. The paper describes the dictionary and its online database and illustrates how its use can be beneficial for a researcher of language; one of the cases considered are negative polarity items.