Russian participle and its functional homonyms in the texts of modern Russian mass media about science and technology

Abstract

In modern Russian media, Russian participles and participial adjectives, nouns and pronouns, which are functional homonyms (similar-sounding etymologically related words), are widely used. In the present paper, based on 3,462 examples selected from the National Corpus of the Russian language, we analyze the prerequisites and the specifics of the transition of participles to other parts of speech, and show the differences between participles and their functional homonyms. The main prerequisite for adjectivation, substantiation and pronominalization of the participle is the attribute of the adjective contained in it, while the semantics of the participle, its position in the sentence and context play an important role. The transition of the participle to other parts of speech is of a gradual nature. Syncretic grammatical character, semantic compression and variability of syntactic functions make the participle one of the priority means of expressing such characteristic features of scientific texts as accuracy, consistency, conciseness and informativeness. In scientific texts, participles and their functional homonyms have different functions: substantive participles mainly perform a nominative function, adjectivated participles — a characterizing function, and pronominalized participles — deictic and other text-forming functions. Studying Russian participles is very difficult for Chinese students due to the fact that Chinese, unlike Russian, is the language of the analytical system, there is no form of participle in it. The division into parts of speech in Chinese is a special problem, since there are no specific morphological indicators in Chinese that characterize each part of speech. The results of the study can be useful when considering complex grammatical issues of the Russian language in the Chinese audience.