Lexemes vozrast (age) and vozrastnoy (age) as euphemisms in modern media discourse

Abstract

The object of this study is the lexemes vozrast and vozrastnoy; the subject of the study is the euphemistic uses of these lexemes and their semantic derivation in modern Russian and in media discourse. The author examines the definitions of lexemes in the main explanatory dictionaries of the Russian language, analyzing their semantic structure. The use of these lexemes in modern journalistic discourse as euphemisms is analyzed on the basis of the National Corpus of the Russian language. The corpus study confirms a significant number of euphemistic names of age in modern Russian, as well as the assumption that in modern journalistic discourse the lexeme vozrast can be used in the meaning of ‘old age’, and vozrastnoy — in the meaning of ‘elderly’. The research was conducted using general scientific methods of component and contextual analysis, corpus research, functional-semantic method, elements of quantitative method, etc. The scientific novelty of the study consists in identifying the features of the functioning of the lexemes vozrast and vozrastnoy, acting as euphemisms, in modern Russian speech (based on the material of media discourse), namely, in the high use of euphemistic uses. Contexts with such uses usually report that the psychological age does not coincide with the physical one, about the desire of people to look younger than their years (more often about women), to hide their real (physical) age, about worries about the past youth. The euphemization reflects the cultural notion of old age as an abnormal age. It is concluded that the euphemistic meanings of the lexemes vozrast and vozrastnoy have become entrenched in the language, have become widely used and stylistically neutral. Thanks to the euphemistic meaning, the lexemes have expanded their use.