The language of Russian proverbs (18TH CENTURY): Word-formation characteristics

Abstract

The article presents the results of the research connected with the language of Russian proverbs and sayings of the 18th century language in the aspect of their word-formation characteristics. The paper provides quantitative data on derivative words, materials of the comparative analysis with data of the main historical dictionaries of the Russian language (first of all - "The dictionary of the Russian language of the 18th century" and "The dictionary of the Russian language of the 11-17th centuries"). The research is conducted on the material of "The dictionary of the language of Russian proverbs and sayings (the end of 17th - the first half of the 18th century)" which describes materials of the collection of Petrovsky gallery and combines features of various linguistic reference books, including the word-formation dictionary. The article describes in details the opportunities which are given to the user by both the paper, and electronic version of the dictionary for the study of word-formation features of the Russian language in the first half of the 18th century (the option of the reverse alphabetical sorting of language units, selection of lexemes on a certain combination of letters at the beginning, the middle or the end of the word). A lot of attention is paid to results of radixation which represents allocation of root elements that allows the authors to show the word in all variety of its word-formation links within the studied collections of proverbs and sayings. Examples of words with certain prefixes and suffixes are also presented along with quantitative data (quantity of radixes, words with a certain prefix and other data).