Semantic Characteristic of Nouns Formed with the Suffix -ost’ in the Modern Russian Literary Language

Abstract

The article aims to demonstrate the semantic diversity of the nouns formed with the suffix -ost, which have been considered as one of the most regular word-formation types in the modern Russian language. In order to give a semantic portray of the given word-formation type we have analysed all the nouns with the given suffix, included in the Shvedova Dictionary and the Russian Newspapers of the End of XX Century Corpus, developed by Laboratory for General and Computational Lexicology and Lexicography, Lomonosov Moscow State University. The analysis shows that nouns formed with the given suffix, while consisting a large percentage of deadjectival nominalisations in the modern Russian language, show rather diverse semantic features. The main subtypes of meanings, which consist the semantic paradigm of the given word-formation type, are transpositional (construction of nouns that name a quality), parametric (nouns that can be used as a parameter for measuring) and subject meaning (nouns that refer to a concrete subject in the extralinguistic reality). In addition, the last subtype subject meaning is also consistent of nearly 20 semantic classes, including substance, a person, a place, a type of documents, an event, a phenomenon and so on. The analysis of the corpus data shows that a large proportion of the most frequently used words in newspaper texts are the words that have rather concrete meanings. Hence their definitions in dictionaries are ought to be updated in accordance with their usages in the corpus. The results could be applied in the future study of deadjectival nominalisation in the modern Russian language

Keywords

• word-formation type
• suffix -ost’
• suffixal nominalisation
• deadjectival nominalisation
• semantic paradigm
• regular polysemy
• syntactic derivation
• lexical derivation