Abstract In this study, we use the General Regionally Annotated Corpus of Ukrainian (GRAC, www.uacorpus.org) as an experimental field for testing stylometric approaches for variationist analysis. While, in the last years, quantitative methods such as binomial mixed-effects regression models as well as machine-learning methods such as random forests have gained considerable popularity in corpus linguistics, methods from stylometry have not been used for variation-linguistic analysis very often. Using data from GRAC, we show that a stylometric approach can be useful to analyze the diachronic development of Standard Ukrainian in the 20th century. We take departure from the two main variants of Standard Ukrainian used in the interwar period in Soviet Ukraine, on the one hand, and Western Ukraine as it was part of the Polish republic, on the other. We ask: what can stylometry tell us about how these standards differed and about their subsequent fate in enlarged Soviet Ukraine after WWII?Our analysis shows that certain specifically Western Ukrainian features common during the first decades of the 20th century did not find their way into the post-WWII standard, while others were retained. Moreover, we show that, by and large, stylometry shows a stronger continuity of the Eastern than the Western standard.Methodologically, we demonstrate that stylometry can be used as a tool to start corpus-linguistic research from a bird’s-eye view and in an inductive manner, without formulating any hypotheses regarding particular variables, and later zoom in on hitherto unknown variables representing regional or diachronic differences.

I explore the ongoing language change in which the impersonal modal word možno ‘can, be possible’ takes a personal clause (možno + nom) as its complement instead of the Experiencer in the Dative case (možno + dat) and the infinitival clause in the speech act of request in Contemporary Russian. The corpus-based evidence reveals that the construction možno + dat is gradually being replaced by možno + nom. I discuss various syntactic and pragmatic factors such as verb class, aspect, transitivity and politeness strategies that motivate the choice of a specific modal construction. Methods of statistical modelling, used to sort out the most significant factors contributing to the choice of construction, show that the most important factor is the date of creation of the text. I propose a scenario for the development of the možno + nom construction. First, možno began to be used as a tag-question after both infinitive and personal clauses. The requester marked by the Dative has been steadily replaced by the more agentive Subject in the Nominative case. Then, by analogy with the možno + dat construction, možno was placed at the beginning of the sentence and was reanalyzed as a constructional unit with the following structure: možno + finite clause, in which možno functions as a sentence adverb.

Recent years have seen considerable debate concerning Russian feminitives, i.e. derived formations that designate female professionals, such as advokatka, advokatša, advokatessa, ženščina-advokat or advokat-ženščina that all refer to female lawyers. In this article, we investigate the use of feminitives based on data from the Araneum Russicum Maximum corpus and the Russian National Corpus. It is shown that the choice of feminitive to some extent depends on the morphophonological properties of the base word. It is furthermore argued that suffixed feminitives are more frequent than compounds like ženščina-advokat and advokat-ženščina, and that the distribution has changed over time. Suffixed feminitives reveal a stronger tendency to combine with gender-related epithets (e.g., obajatel’naja agentka ‘charming agent’), while the type ženščina-X is frequently used with the epithet pervyj ‘first’. Our article is an empirical study of the actual use of feminitives in corpus data, which we hope will inform future metalinguistic discussion and prescriptivist thinking about feminitives in Russian.