Empirical and system productivity of names of persons with the meaning "heir to the title" In Russian language

Abstract

The article observes the evolution of lexical meanings for such words as 'knyazych / knyazhna', 'boyarich / boyaryshnya', 'prince / princess' and 'crown prince / crown princess' through the prism of historical change in different periods of Russian language world picture development. In the introduction, we note that the study of social semantics lexemes helps to characterize the axiological pluralism in respect of title names of persons, and also reflects the historical changes in society. The section "Materials and methods" states that on the basis of dictionaries, published for the period since XIX to XXI century, the development of words lexical polysemy was analyzed during a particular era. In order to investigate the actualization / deactualization of these lexemes in the book speech, the data of the electronic library GoogleBooks were used. the section "Study results" provides an overview of correlation frequency in respect of a word usage in speech with the development of its polysemanticism, fixed in the lexicographical sources. According to the graphs of comparison the word pairs 'knyazych / knyazhna', 'boyarich / boyaryshnya', 'prince / princess' and 'crown prince / crown princess' and their spellings were compared before the Russian revolution of 1917. Most of these titles were written with a capital letter. Another feature of these pairs is that they belong to different derivational nests if an identical derivation model is taken into account (knyazhich and boyarich) and in some cases the etymological proximity of derivational bases (King and Cesar). The section "conclusions" notes that during the XIX century the abovementioned appellatives were subjected to stylistic and lexical differentiation in order to prevent the existence of two similar sounding words with the same semantics. If we compare the quantitative characteristics of "male" and "female" titles, then we may conclude that the male monarch titles are more frequent than the female ones and the female noble titles are more popular than the male ones. At the end of the article there is an attempt to describe the effect of historical processes on the use frequency change of the mentioned titles.