SEMANTIC DYNAMIC PROCESSES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE EVALUATIVE LEXIS OF THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE IN THE 19th CENTURY

Abstract

The study considers evaluative lexemes of Modern Russian in a retrospective way which developed their pejorative meanings in the 19th century under the influence of linguistic and extralinguistic factors. The data was collected from the academic dictionaries of Modern Russian. The pejorative lexemes are represented by all notional parts of speech and by different topical domains. The main methods employed in the research are descriptive, contrastive, within which historical-semantic analysis is carried out, definitional, corpus analysis. The common semantic shifts are considered due to which the nineteenth-century words developed pejorative meaning. Some topical domains are studied that acquire negative sense development more easily. It is stated that the words which underwent semantic changes were of different origin (Church Slavic, dialectal, borrowings, spoken words, ect.). It has been found out that the majority of pejorative lexemes emerged as a result of semantic (frequently metaphorical) extension of the words which had existed in Russian for quite a lot of time. The driving force for appearing new negative meanings happened to be the formation of Modern Standard Russian in the first third of the 19th century. Besides, the formation of the publicist style along with the numerous coming out of social and political literature had a great impact on pejorative sense development.