Социальный статус купца в русском языке: номинативные и характеризующие признаки

• Published in: Studia z filologii polskiej i słowiańskiej 2019-01, Vol.54
• Main Author: Фролова, Ольга Е
• Format: Article
• Language: Russian
• Subjects: Adjectives; Connotation; Corpus linguistics; Grammatical case; Lexical semantics; Merchants; Naming; Nouns; Russian language; Social classes; Sociolinguistics; Word meaning
• ISSN: 0081-7090; 2392-2435
• DOI: 10.11649/sfps.1801

This article describes connotations of a noun which is a denomination of social status. In the Russian language, the lexicosemantic group “social stratification” is directly related to the hierarchy of legally defined social estates. The study analyses interpretations of meanings of the personal noun kupets ‘merchant’ and the adjective kupecheskiĭ ‘merchant’ provided in explanatory dictionaries, and examines the connectivity of the adjective in the Russian National Corpus. The results make it possible to distinguish between the denotative and connotative use of the adjectival phrase ‘merchant’ + noun. In nineteenth-century Russian, the denotative aspect of those attributive word combinations is related to the house and the family, which reflects the features of the corporate structure of merchant enterprise. The connotative group, in turn, is divided into three subgroups: the metagroup, evaluative and visual. The metagroup includes nouns that allow to describe the supraindividual community defined by merchant status: stil′ ‘style’, manera ‘manner’. The evaluative subgroup is associated with wealth, absence of control and lack of taste. The visual subgroup of attributive word combinations describes the image of the male merchant using the nouns boroda ‘beard’ and briukho ‘belly’. Identification of the visual image of the female merchant required a change of the search unit in the Russian National Corpus. The combination adjective + adjective ‘merchant’ + noun zhena ‘wife’, vdova ‘widow’, doch′ ‘daughter’, and also phrases with the noun kupchikha ‘female merchant’ were checked in the Russian National Corpus. In this case, the important characteristics included ‘demonstrative wealth of the costume’ and ‘lack of taste’. The feature ‘full body’ is not genderrelevant and describes both the male and the female merchant.