The paper presents a research tool for studying semantic change and polysemy patterns in Russian adjectives and adverbs. It is based on a corpus analysis of high-freqency polysemous units. For each of them we describe the meanings it can have, assign to each meaning a corresponding taxonomic class, identify types of semantic shifts between individual meanings (metaphor, metonymy; besides, a full-scale approach reveals non-canonical cases of semantic shifts), describe context conditions of these shifts (semantic and grammatical restrictions on co-occurring words). The results gained from this analysis are implemented in a database, which allows for various generalizations on the regularities of change in adjective and adverb meaning. Several examples are given to illustrate what kinds of queries can be performed on the database. Keywords: polysemy; semantic shift; metaphor; metonymy; semantics of adjectives; Russian language; lexical database