On the data chosen from two comparable large corpora, one from the period of the
Communist Totality, the other from Today, namely post-totalitarian period, an attempt
has been made to compare vocabulary of both periods and some of its typical lexemes
as well as collocations. Through this corpus approach both a skeleton picture of both
periods as well as of the current notions, typical of these widely different times, could
have been, hopefully, drawn and through that, main features of both periods and society
living in them obtained. The research is an off-spin of a Dictionary of the Totalitarian
Period published recently and is to be seen as a continuation of it. The Totalitarian vocabulary
and the corpus have been based (each around half a million of words), mostly,
on the Communist newspapers while a corresponding corpus of the same newspaper
type of texts from the Czech National Corpus has been used as a counterweight. Thus,
effectively, vocabulary of these two periods spanned over some 50 years.
