The Problem of Semantic Shift in Modern Russian: Corpus Research on the Example of a News Media Discourse

Abstract

This study discusses the issue of semantic shifts observed in high-frequency words, such as discourse, paradigm, narrative , in the news media discourse in the Russian language. It is shown that one of the effective methods of research is corpus analysis, for which an author’s corpus was created based on a random sample of texts of news articles published on the portal of the state news agency RIA Novosti over 2020-2023. Dynamic processes in the semantics of the analyzed highfrequency words were studied on the material of the National Corpus of the Russian language for the period 2000-2019. When considering the results obtained by the corpus analysis method, it was found out that, being initially the linguistic term, “narrative” turned into a functional proforma as a result of a semantic shift that occurred due to the diversity of newly acquired meanings, i.e. there was a modification of the original meaning of the word ‘ story, narration’ , which made the world into the universal one. The classical meaning of the word ‘ paradigm’ , characteristic of linguistics, is not represented in journalism, in the news media discourse it has been given other connotations such as scheme, model, idea, situation , which have moved into the core, nuclear area from the position of the near periphery. Some values are unique, so they have a small frequency (ipm). The interdisciplinary term “discourse” has turned into a term with vague semantics, but, unlike “narrative”, it is not a universal professional form, although it denotes processes occurring in various social spheres. It is shown that the semantic shift is not identical to the increase in the meaning of the word and is not determined strictly contextually. It is necessary to distinguish between the concept of semantic shift and the appearance of new meanings of the word, since the former is fixed in non-standard contexts and the demonstrated meaning cannot be clearly defined. In the course of the study, it was possible to establish that not all semantic shifts should be classified as erroneous, since it depends on the sphere in which the shift was detected. The use of the considered words in a different meaning is not profane, since the mobility of the lexical level of the language leads to transformations in speech and media discourse, allowing the appearance of texts stylistically close to the spoken style. Thus, we have identified and confirmed quantitatively the process of transformation of the words selected for analysis into pro-forms used as substitutes for a wide range of concepts.