Evaluative Senses in Russian Grammar (on the basis of verbs of emotional attitude)

Abstract

The article deals with the evaluative characteristics of lexis which are reflected in Russian grammar. The idea of semantic basis of grammar, created and developed by Anna Wierzbicka, has a continuation in the study of role and place of evaluative senses in productive grammar of the Russian language. The activity approach to the description of the language, adopted in this paper, involves studying the role of a subjective factor in Russian grammar. The article demonstrates the results of research aimed at the analysis of semantic space of Russian verbs. The aim of the work is to identify evaluative senses that are important for grammar and to demonstrate how the subjective component of the verb meaning influences the way of expressing its actant positions. The research has been conducted using the methods and operational procedures of component analysis, equivalent substitutions and context transformations, modeling and a linguistic experiment. The work has been carried out on the material of Russian dictionaries with the use of data from the National Corpus of the Russian language. As a result, the connection between intellectual and emotional evaluative characteristics of verb having an output in the grammatical space of the language has been established. It was demonstrated that evaluation (positive or negative), which verbal semantics contains, affects the syntagmatic behavior of the verb selectively and requires additional efforts in solving the problem of establishing those semantic zones where the role of evaluation component in the grammatical formulation of actant positions is the most significant. One of such semantic spheres is verbal lexicon which denotes the subject’s attitude to his/her own actions. Positive or negative evaluation in this case is significant for making the verb actant frame. The obtained results let raise the question of identifying the vector of estimation orientation in Russian grammar. The study of verbal semantics in its projection on syntagmatic properties makes it possible to find a new perspective for the disclosure of national-specific worldview. The continuation of the research in chosen direction could contribute to the development of comparative axiology.