It is often said that the eyes are the mirror of the soul. What kind of mirror is it? What can human eyes be like? Blue, brown, black, green, penetrating, unseeing, passionate... Once "Literaturnaya Gazeta" offered its readers to supplement the list of synonyms for the word die started by the notorious Bezenchuk. Readers readily responded, and the list turned out to be quite impressive. But what about other equally interesting words? You can't even find that many readers... Only one thing remains - to call on the help of equipment. Recently, the so-called corpus of texts has become very widespread, that is, collections of various kinds of texts in electronic form with the ability to compile frequent word lists, search for examples, etc.They allow you to quickly collect language material. We have at our disposal a corpus of texts of Russian and Soviet fiction of the XX century. It includes works by various authors: M. Bulgakov and A. Tolstoy, M. Sholokhov and Yu. Bondarev, A. Green and V. Aksenov, a total of about 170 texts by 75 authors. The volume of the corpus is 6.5 million word uses. This impressive coverage of the material served as the basis for the study on " What can eyes be like?" Phrases like "adjective + eyes" were found in the studied texts about 3,200 times. (The data provided should be treated with caution: only adjectives, the nearest neighbors of the noun eye (i.e. from the word "eye") were taken into account.- page 17 chetania big blue eyes (only the adjective blue is reflected ). In addition, since our corpus includes entire texts, there is an inevitable "bias" towards Sholokhov, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn and other authors of long novels. Thus, the presented data indicate only trends in the use of certain definitions in the language of Russian and Soviet writers of the XX century.) There are almost 800 definitions in the list, of which 70 were used more than 10 times. And there are almost 400 cases of a single use of this or that definition. The most ... Read more