Russian Verbal Nouns of the XVIII Century: Derivational and Functional Aspects

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Abstract:

Over the past three centuries researchers have noted the activation of word formation process in the Russian language, which is associated with the change in the vocabulary of the language due to the significant changes in the society. Not only special, but also encyclopedic issues contain information that XVIII century was characterized by a vivid and intense process of word formation. This paper studies the Russian verbal nouns formed in the XVIII century and considers their formation and functioning.

The Russian word formation of the XVIII century has been analyzed mainly on the material of fiction and vernacular texts in the capital region. This study was based on four types of sources: linguistic work of XIX–early XX century; Russian dictionaries; handwritten housing business texts of the second half of the XVIII century; the regional documents, compiled in the offices of Western Siberia (which reflect the natural speech element). In the synchronic aspect 37 deverbatives recorded in 347 documents of Western Siberia have been investigated. The work implemented a systematic approach to the study of the material, involving a sequence of complex (word-formation and semantic) analysis using synchronous principles. We distinguish the following levels of the derivative semantics: 1) common values of word-formation; 2) private derivational values. Structural data analyzed units mostly correlate with the data highlighted by the researchers in the analysis of the sources of the central (European) part of Russia, though the lexical meaning of the same units in Siberian documents (provincial texts), in some cases, are not the same as recorded in the historical dictionaries. In such case we formulate its own meaning based on the derivative semantics of the new words and the realization of tokens in text sources, reflecting the regional (Tyumen) business communications.

Using the data from the Russian National Corpus we have received the representation about the future study of the “Tyumen” words and noted the cases of discrepancy in the dictionary, text, and corpus glossaries.

References:

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