Authors
- Ogoltseva Ekaterina V. Doctor of Philology, docent
Annotation
The article examines the functioning of parallel diminutive forms using the example of modification derivatives derived from the motivator «mountain». The author
qualifies forms such as gorka – gorochka – gorushka as a manifestation of the variation of linguistic units at the word-formation level. The observations presented in the article confirm the thesis about the semantic syncretism of diminutives. Suffixal variants, which are representatives of the same word-formation paradigm, differ both in the quantitative ratio of the «size» (diminutive) and subjective-evaluative components, and in the qualitative features of their semantics, which are determined by the specificity of the suffixal component and the sphere of use of each of the compared derivatives. In other words, the members of such diminutive series are not equivalent in semantic and functional terms: while they share the same basic meanings, they differ in their shades of meaning, connotations, sphere of use, and figurative potential. All of this indicates that it is appropriate to consider diminutive forms as phenomena of word formation. Based on the data from the National Corpus of the Russian Language, some conclusions have been drawn regarding the scope of use of the analyzed derivatives. The specific features of the connotations inherent in their semantics and regularly manifested in real-life usage have been identified. The article also examines the use of diminutives in the context of terminological names, as well as the contextual conditions under which these words acquire an ironic connotation. The analysis of the facts of variation in the sphere of diminutive formations allows
us to address a number of relevant issues in modern Russian word formation and grammatical semantics: word-formation synonymy; competition between word-formation variants and their functions in texts; mechanisms for forming groups of nouns with formally unexpressed collective meaning; regularity of the manifestation of the semantic features «unreal» and «similar» in diminutives of the most productive word-formation types; the problem of the lexicalization of diminutives; and the formation of phraseologically bound meanings in the semantic structure of diminutive forms.
How to link insert
Ogoltseva, E. V. (2026). GORKA, GOROCHKA, GORUSHKA: ON THE VARIABILITY OF DIMINUTIVE FORMS IN RUSSIAN Bulletin of the Moscow City Pedagogical University. Series "Pedagogy and Psychology", 1 (61), 80. https://doi.org/10.24412/2076-913X-2026-161-80-96
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