THE NOUN VISILKA: A SEMANTIC PORTRAIT AND A SYSTEM OF MULTIPLE MEANINGS (based on police search documentation of the second half of the 19th century)

Abstract

This article is devoted to one of the important aspects of studying the Russian business language of the second half of the 19th century — the formation of the lexical meaning of the noun visilka (exile, expulsion), typical of the police procedure documentation of the time. The author discovered business texts of this type in the funds of the State Archive of the Tyumen region, the State Archive of the Omsk region, and the State Archive of the Irkutsk region. All texts date back to the late 19th century. The study of the lexeme visilka was conducted in ac­cordance with the lexicographic portraiture methodology (proposed by Apresyan and Mayorov) and the principles of linguistic study of source texts. A comprehensive analysis of the lexical distribution of the noun visilka determined the necessity of abstract or concrete-abstract vector locatives, which expanded the lexical meaning of this lexeme in the business texts of the second half of the 19th century. The authors identified the main semantic features of the noun visilka (the dominance of the archiseme — 'process', the existence of the differen­tial semes 'result', 'actions of people involved in a police search'). Further research is aimed at examining business writings from Western and Eastern Siberia, which belong to a different genre and a different time period. Further research will be based on the texts from the Nation­al Corpus of the Russian language, the Uppsala and Tyubinsk corpuses, the database of the Russian press Integrum and Open Corpus.

Keywords

• business writing
• linguistic source studies
• diachronic linguistics
• historical syntax
• documentary linguistics
• archival sources
• investigative cases