Русская глубинка: языковая экспликация семантики провинции

Abstract

The paper discusses the features of expressing the semantics of the province through the “hinterland” naming unit. It is ascertained that this naming unit began to be used in relation to the territory of our country in the XX century. The aim of the research is to determine how the peculiarities of representation of space by the “hinterland” naming unit manifest themselves. Based on the data of Russian language dictionaries, the semantics of the “hinterland” lexeme is described. As a result of continuous sampling from the materials of the Russian National Corpus and the East View Information Services, combinations of the noun “hinterland” with adjectives and participles have been selected. Scientific novelty of the research lies in describing three groups of adjectives characterising the administrative-territorial division of the country, the territories of foreign states, as well as the territory of Russia in relation to national, natural and other features. The research findings have shown that the combinations of the analysed word with adjectives derived from toponyms are the most frequent ones. The phrases characterising the peculiarities of the territory of the state are less frequent, but they possess the qualities of all the representants of the “Province” semantic field: the ability to recursively denote space, express the axiology of a place, etc.