<i>Udareniye</i>: Diachronic and Lexicographic Description of the Linguistic Term and its Breaking Away from the Greek and Church Slavonic Tradition

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of the Russian linguistic term “udareniye” (“stress” / “accent”) from the historicolinguistic, etymological and lexicographic viewpoints. Currently, there are hardly any studies analyzing the term’s semantic development or attempts to present its semantic structure in a dictionary, based on textual and lexicographic sources ranging from the end of the 16th to the end of the 19th century, that would make it possible that would make it possible to trace the semantic changes of the term in the course of time. The existing studies mainly address the the issues of terminology developed in individual authors’ grammars, or describe the terminology of grammars related to a certain period of time or a specific epoch. The purpose of this article is to systematize etymological information about the term “udareniye”, to conduct an historico-linguistic analysis of its semantics, starting with the first Russian grammars and lexicons. The research uses comparative, definitional, etymological, semantic and lexicographic methods. The semantic structure of the term “udareniye”, when taking into account its two main meanings (emphasizing of some syllable in the word with voice and reflection of such an emphasis in writing by graphical means, e.g. diacritics), begins to take shape from its first written fixation in 1591 in Adelphotes and ends by 1830, when grammarians finally stopped associating the Russian accent, uniform by nature, with the sound length and modulations of the tone, and focused their attention on the study of intensity (pronouncing power), which can be regarded as the main acoustic feature of the stressed syllable in languages with dynamic stress. By this time, the type of the Russian stress stops being identified with the Greek and Church Slavonic patterns and the attempts to uncritically borrow the corresponding terminological nominations with their forms and meanings from Greek into Russian come to an end. The term “udareniye” got probably for the first time its lexicographic entry at the beginning of the 18th century due to Polikarpov-Orlov who described its meaning 1 in his dictionary. In its meaning 2 – based on the Greek-Church Slavonic tradition, – the term is found in almost all the text sources examined by the author, starting from Adelphotes, that is from the end of the 16th century. As for its first lexicographic fixation, it took place in 1763 in Poletika’s dictionary.