MATERIAL NOUNS UNDER A SEMANTIC MICROSCOPE: EXERCISES FOR CLASSES IN MODERN RUSSIAN

Abstract

The article presents a system of partial meanings of material nouns, which are most clearly realized in plural forms, uncharacteristic for this lexical and grammatical category. The ban on the formation of plural forms for material and abstract nouns denoting continual substances (substances, states, actions, processes) in the Russian language of recent decades has been violated with enviable regularity. The plural forms, which appeared as a result of semantic transformations, concretization and subsequent terminology of meanings, smoothly move from a special scientific discourse due to the language of modern fiction, advertising, media, and no longer seem to be something unusual. The purpose of the article is to create a holistic view of the semantic paradigm of material nouns through the consideration of individual meanings. The article is addressed to readers who teach or study the morphology of the modern Russian language, the translation of a scientific text, the scientific style of speech at advanced levels (B1, B2). The material will be of interest to teachers of Russian as a foreign language, especially those working with students from Southeast Asia, since there is no category of numbers in a number of languages of these countries. The analyzed meanings of material nouns are illustrated with contexts taken from the National Corpus of the Russian Language, Internet sources.