Verbs of the Emotional States of Shame and Embarrassment in Russian: A Diachronic Aspect

Abstract

This article is devoted to the description of verbs of the emotional states of shame, embarrassment, and shyness in the diachronic aspect. The relevance of the research is due to the need to expand knowledge about the dynamic changes in the vocabulary of emotions, and the impact of cultural and political transformations on these changes. Although semantic differences in Russian expressions for shame-like emotional states have been well studied, diachronic changes in the meanings of these expressions have received little attention. The scholarly novelty of this work is determined by the fact that it examines the diachronic development of the verbs for these emotional states, which occurred in the Russian language in the eleventh–twenty-first centuries, and the factors that caused these changes. The data have been collected from explanatory dictionaries of the modern Russian language, etymological dictionaries, and historical dictionaries of different ages and coverage, as well as the National Russian electronic corpora. The material for the study was data from explanatory dictionaries of the modern Russian language, historical, and etymological dictionaries of the Russian language, as well as data from the National Corpus of the Russian language. The theoretical basis of this research was formed by works in the field of the linguistics of emotions and linguistic culture. The main research methods were the contextual-functional method, as well as etymological analysis. This study demonstrates that in the process of the semantic development of the verbs of shame and embarrassment in the Russian language, both general tendencies towards a decrease in the polysemy of semantically overloaded linguistic structures and tendencies towards a more accurate and precise labelling of various aspects of emotional states play an important role. It is shown that during the semantic development of words denoting shame and embarrassment, the polysemy “to be shameful” / “to feel shame” was gradually lost and the polysemy “to be ashamed” / “to be embarrassed” decreased in use. The article also describes the main patterns of semantic derivation that are typical of verbs of shame and embarrassment, which appear in the Russian language of different centuries.