Cities, mountains, roads... (the image of a city in formulaic paronymic collocations)

Abstract

The article analyses the collocations of the lexeme 'gorod (city)' with its paronyms — words that are pronounced or written in a similar way, not necessarily connected etymo­lo­gi­cally. These collocations, which appear in paronymic attraction and repeated many times, are called formulaic. The research presented in the article confirms the assumption that the stable pa­ronymic collocations do not unite random words but a type of mythologemes — 'gorod’, ‘go­ra’ and ‘doroga’. They reflect the concepts of two types of cities: concentric, eleva­ted on the mountain, and eccentric, located in the boundaries, encouraging to overcome them. The article explores the use of formulaic collocations ‘gorod — gora’, ‘gorod — doroga; ‘gorod — doroga — gora’ during the 20th and early 21st centuries. The research is based on the mate­rial of the poetic subcorpus of the National Corpus of the Russian language and the Card In­dex of the Dictionary of Russian Poetry of the 20th century. The study employs a variety of me­thods — corpus, semantic, syntactic and textual analyses.

Keywords

• paronymy
• paronymic attraction
• paronymic paradigms
• formula combinations
• city image