Известия Уральского федерального университета. Серия 2: Гуманитарные науки (Dec 2016)
On Metaphor in the Lexical Semantic Group “Criminal”
Abstract
The article deals with figurative meanings of the lexical semantic group “Criminal”. The composition of the group is determined by means of continuous sampling from legislative documents, namely, the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation and the Russian Federation Administrative Offence Code, which enables the author to single out the names of criminal offences and demonstrate that they are terminological in their nature, while the names of offenders are part of common literary vocabulary. There are over 60 words that make up the group of words denoting criminals, and 18 of them are polysemantic. Their metaphorical meanings are determined with the help of explanatory dictionaries. The author demonstrates how their metaphorical meanings have developed in the early 21st century. The group of words denoting criminals consists of four subgroups selected depending on the character of the evaluation, the presence of semantics of harm done by the criminal, and involvement of other participants in the situation. Thus, the author singles out such groups as a) independent negative evaluational; b) ambivalent evaluational; c) negative evaluational; d) relative negative evaluational. The use of words denoting offenders in speech is illustrated with reference to the Russian National Corpus. The author demonstrates that the figurative meanings of the items of the group are united by the semantics of naïve accusation, which is expressed by the discrepancy of the denomination and the situation reflected in speech, as well as harm done. In everyday communication, the addresser chooses a word with a negative connotation without complying with the factual component of the meaning: the pattern N + linking verb + ‘fraud’ is a usual one as long as there has been an act of fraud. Such predicative nominations outside of a professional context are a means to express an opinion or a negative evaluation of an addressee or any other person.
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