Meaning and Use of the Words DOBROVOLETS and VOLUNTEER in the Russian Language (according to the Russian National Corpus)

Abstract

The observations on the meaning and use of the words dobrovolets and volunteer in the Russian language in different historical periods in legal and non-legal contexts are presented in the article. It is shown that if in the language of documents these words act today as absolute synonyms, then in a non-terminological context they differ from each other by the components of lexical meanings, which must be determined to clarify the use of these lexical units in speech. The relevance of addressing the stated pair of words is due to a question that arises, for example, to reporters: in which case it is better to use the word dobrovolets , and in which - volunteer . To solve this problem, an attempt was made to highlight the history of the formation and development of the semantic structure of the words dobrovolets and volunteer, as well as to identify and describe the distinctive semantic features of the considered lexemes in modern Russian language. The study is carried out mainly on the basis of the Russian National Corpus. Using frequency diagrams of the use of words at different time intervals, on the thematic sections of the texts in which they are found, according to their compatibility with adjectives, the author describes the semantic differences of the lexical units of dobrovolets and volunteer .

Keywords

• borrowing
• synonyms
• semantic relationships
• meaning component
• corpus linguistics