The purpose of this paper is to analyze the combinability of the near-synonyms беспорядки (disturbances) and волнения (unrest). Their combinatorial properties are investigated using extensive corpus data –Sketch Engine and the Russian National Corpus (RNC). Investigating combinatorial features through the use of text corpora can help identify semantic differences that are not intuitively obvious. I will demonstrate how combinatorial properties were discovered, since analysis of these materials has revealed a number of combinatorial preferences. In future studies my findings will serve as the basis for identifying semantic and pragmatic distinctions between these near-synonyms.