The Syntaxeme 'pri tsare' (‘in tsarist time’) in the Meaning of ‘in Russia until 1917’ (according to the Russian National Corpus)

Abstract

The article is devoted to the linguistic means, trought which native speakers of the Russian language structure their history, divide it into periods. Such means include, in particular, indications of significant events (before / after the Revolution) and the nature of state power: pri tsare (‘in tsarist time’), under the Soviet regime. The aim of the article is to describe the semantics, the pragmatics, the synonymic and antonymic relations of the syntaxeme pri tsare (‘in tsarist time’) in the temporal absolutive use (without the extension of the definition). This use of the syntaxeme emerges after 1917, before which the syntaxeme is used in the temporal sense only with specifying definitions such as pri tsare Petre (‘in the time of Peter 1’). The research material was found in the contexts borrowed from the main subcorpus of the Russian National corpus, the entire collection of samples consists of 964 contexts, 368 contexts are related to the temporal absolute use of the syntaxeme in questions. The analysis of contexts with the absolute temporal use of the syntaxeme allows us to identify the meaning 'in Russia before 1917' and several subtypes (shades of meaning): ‘under the tsarist regime’ (denotes a wide time range with a blurred lower border), ‘in the pre-revolutionary period’ (several decades, the reign of Nicholas II), ‘a very long time ago'. The article uses quantitative, functional-semantic, descriptive methods, uses the method of component analysis, and considers the dynamic aspect (analyzes the change in the meaning of syntaxeme during the last century). The relevance of the study is due to the fact that lexicographic sources cannot explain the peculiarities of the use of the nominations under consideration, therefore, a description of their semantics and pragmatics with а linguocultural commentary is required.