The lexeme "normal" in Russian speech: a case study

Abstract

The subject of the study is the lexeme "normal", a multidimensional analysis of which is carried out on the basis of data from the National Corpus of the Russian Language (NCRR), which includes more than 2 billion words, which makes it quite representative. The purpose of the work is to determine the composition of the homocomplex "normal" in modern Russian, to compare homonyms in semantic, syntagmatic, functional aspects. The relevance of the research undertaken is due to the fact that the lexicographic literature does not provide a complete description of all homonyms "normal". Thus, the predicative "normally" has remained outside the attention of lexicographers, although it is in this category that the pragmatic potential of the studied word is realized; in addition, cases of using the word in a discursive function have not been noted. This study was conducted on the basis of a concordance of 4055 texts with this lexeme, a large amount of material allowed us to draw conclusions about the quantitative and qualitative features of the functioning of this homocomplex. In accordance with this goal, descriptive, quantitative, statistical methods, as well as corpus analysis methods were used in the work. The methodological basis of the research was the works devoted to the problem of functional homonymy (V. V. Vinogradov, O. S. Akhmanova, V. V. Babaytseva, P. A. Lekant, etc.) and methods of corpus linguistics (O. N. Lyashevskaya, N. V. Pertsov, V. A. Plungyan, E. V. Rakhilina, D. V. Sichinava, etc.). The results The following provisions became the basis of the work: based on the data selected from the corpus, it is argued that the homocomplex "normally" unites a group of functional homonyms (adjective in short form; adverb; predicative (category of state); interjection), which differ in a set of morphological features, syntactic function, syntagmatic features, semantics expressed in speech. It is concluded that all these homonyms are active in modern Russian speech; they have pragmatic and stylistic features in different speech spheres. The first texts with the predicative "normally", as well as with the homonymous adverb, recorded in the NCRR, belong to the end of the XIX century; the use of "normally" as an interjection in a discursive function appears much later, in the 1980s. Statistical methods allowed us to determine the most frequent collocations with the lexeme "normally".