Functioning of derived nouns with the suffix -(e)nie in A.I. Herzen's 'My Past and Thoughts'

Abstract

The paper focuses on the semantics and functioning of nouns with the suffix -(e)nie (-(е)ние) in A.I. Herzen's “My Past and Thoughts”. The research novelty is determined by the lack of linguistic knowledge about A.I. Herzen's writings. The research relevance is defined by the necessity to complete the analytic view of Russian language history and historical stylistics. The analysis has been carried out based on the Russian National Corpus, using the continuous sampling method. As a result of the analysis, quantitative data have been obtained. Furthermore, A.I. Herzen's usage of nouns has been characterized from the diachronic point of view, i.e., it has been revealed how active he was in usage of outdated lexemes or, on the contrary, new ones. To fulfill this purpose, data from the customized sub-corpus covering the “My Past and Thoughts” text have been compared with the main corpus data. It has been found out that nouns with the suffix -(e)nie- are exceptionally frequent in “My Past and Thoughts”. The data are characterized by several parameters: from the point of their origins, which are determined, in particular, by producing stems' features; from the point of usage frequency, both in works contemporary to Herzen's writings, as well as those preceding it and created later. A.I. Herzen uses a) various archaisms, including those related to the Church Slavonic tradition (though, mainly, in non-sacral contexts), loan words subsequently displaced by their synonyms, and nouns motivated by verbs with outdated vocalization; b) words new to his time, but widespread later; c) occasional derivates. The essential features of writer's personality are the usage of suffix derivates based on imperfective verb stems, and also non-standard context decisions.

Keywords

• a.i. herzen
• “my past and thoughts”
• suffix derivates
• nouns
• structure
• semantics
• usage
• functioning