OTTEPEL (‘THAW’) AS A METAPHORICAL REFERENCE TO A HISTORICAL PERIOD

Abstract

The article deals with the semantic structure of the word ottepel(‘thaw’), the relevant information comingfrom the National Corpus of the Russian language (hereinafter referred to as NCRL). The main attention is paid to ottepel(‘thaw’) as a metaphorical nomination of one of the periods of the Russian history. The aim of the article is to describe the semantic development of the word and to explain the peculiarities of its modern functioning and punctuation in derivative meanings. The basic meaning (the core seme - ‘change’) and its connotations (‘unpredict-ability’, ‘short duration’), realized in derivative meanings, are described. The pragmatics and syntactics of this lexeme of fatalism and uncontrollability, typical of the Russian linguistic world view, is revealed. The sources of high ‘positive potential’ of the metaphorottepel(‘thaw’) are discussed in detail, as well as the connection with connotations of the word ‘spring’ and with other ‘temperature’ metaphors. The opposition to the substantive of frost is considered as an element of the ‘cyclic’ representation of historical time. Based on the analysis of modern contexts, derivative meanings that are not recorded in dictionaries are identified, 250 contexts are distributed according to the selected meanings, and the punctuation of the word is analyzed. The authors provide the results of a linguistic experiment aimed at identifying the features of the punctuation design of a word in different meanings. The authors analyze the reasons why the widely used linguistic metaphor ottepel(‘thaw’) in the meaning of ‘historical period’ in most contexts is given in quotation marks, while in other derived meanings this metaphor is usually used without quotation marks, even if it has an occasional character. If, at the stage of the metaphor entering into the language, the use of quotation marks can be explained by reference to a literary source and vivid imagery, at present such explanations are not enough. In the considered derivative meaning, the word ottepel (‘thaw’) is an ideologeme - a word that belongs to an ideologically marked discourse, and quotation marks as an indicator of distancing allow the speaker to remove ideological bias, to make the nomination neutral. The conclusion is made that the derivative metaphorical meaning of thaw is a positively evaluative wordideologeme, which prevents it from becoming the main nomination of the corresponding historical period.