The functioning of the Russian word “century” (vek) in the area of nuclear / peripheral nouns and hybrid structures

Shigurov Viktor Vasil'evich ORCID: 0000-0002-4898-6484 Doctor of Philology Professor; Department of Russian Language; National Research Mordovian State University named after N.P. Ogarev 430010, Russia, Republic of Mordovia, Saransk, Serova str., 3, sq. 12 shigurov@mail.ru Other publications by this author     Shigurova Tat'yana Alekseevna ORCID: 0000-0002-5342-8471 Doctor of Cultural Studies Professor; Institute of National Culture; Ogarev National Research Mordovian State University 430010, Russia, Saransk, Serova str., 3, sq. 12 shigurova_tatyana@mail.ru

Pulov Evgenii Viktorovich ORCID: 0000-0002-1946-9760 PhD in Philology Associate Professor; Faculty of Philology; Ogarev National Research Mordovian State University 430021, Russia, Republic of Mordovia, Saransk, Volgogradskaya str., 33, sq. 74 puool@yandex.com

1. Introductory remarks

The most important task of the transpositional grammar of the Russian language is a comprehensive study of the mechanism of stepwise transposition of linguistic units in the sphere of parts of speech and interparticle categories of impersonal-predicative and introductory-modal words and expressions that produce syncretic structures in speech that allow concise, but multifaceted, and succinct presentation of information (see, for example: ^{[1; 3; 4; 8, pp. 9-25; 18, pp. 38-48; 19, pp. 19-32; 22, pp. 177-191]}). The types of interaction of words and word forms in the grammatical structure of the language were considered within the framework of the theory of transposition (translation, conversion, derivation, transformation, etc.) by leading Russian and foreign researchers (see: ^{[2; 5; 6, pp. 52-58; 7, pp. 57-71; 13; 14, pp. 78-80; 15, pp. 25-38; 20; 21]}). The relevance of the study of the problem of noun adverbialization in both dynamic and static aspects is due to the increased attention of scientists to the phenomenon of qualitative characterization of events and their elements (see, for example.: ^{[10; 11; 16; 17]}). Due to the lack of knowledge of the mechanism of functional and functional-semantic adverbialization of prepositional forms of nouns, it is important to investigate the causes, semantic and morphological prerequisites, syntactic conditions, signs (changes in adverbializable substantive formations at the level of lexical and grammatical semantics, morphological categories and paradigms, morphemic structure, syntagmatic features, etc.), stages of adverbialization and the limit; the interaction of parts of speech and interparticle semantic and syntactic units in the structure of linguistic units that explicate different degrees of adverbialization, including when the process of adverbialization intersects with the processes of pronominalization, particularization, predication, and modalation. The novelty of the work lies in the fact that, using the example of the word form of the century, it shows the stages and signs of the grammatical and lexico-grammatical transposition of substantives into aspectual-temporal adverbs.

The purpose of the work is to describe the features of the use of nouns in nominative and accusative forms without prepositions when explicating different stages of transposition into aspectual–temporal adverbs. The object of analysis is word forms that reveal a certain degree of deviation from nouns and approximation to adverbs during adverbialization. The subject of consideration is the stages, signs and limit of the adverbialization of the century's substantive. The research material includes the contexts of the use of nuclear, peripheral nouns and adverbs, as well as hybrid structures from the "National Corpus of the Russian Language" (hereinafter: [NCRR]) ^[9]. Access mode: http://www.ruscorpora.ru /, as well as the authors' own examples, The reliability of the conclusions is ensured by the use of such research methods as descriptive, structural-semantic, distributive, transformational, linguistic experiment. The application of the oppositional analysis technique allowed us to substantiate the attribution of typical contexts of the use of the word form of the eyelids to different stages of adverbialization.

2. Results and discussion

The study of the mechanism of adverbial transposition of different case forms of nouns without prepositions shows that a relatively small group of nouns in the nominative, accusative and creative cases expressing temporal and aspectual-temporal relations is involved in this process. We are talking about adverbs like winter, spring, summer, autumn; morning, evening, afternoon, night; evening, yesterday; century, etc.

Their adverbialization in modern language is represented by different stages, fixed in typical contexts. Among them, word forms can be distinguished that explicate nuclear adverbs like evening, yesterday (there was a thunderstorm), peripheral adverbs like winter, spring, morning (go camping), as well as adverbial word forms representing peripheral zones (we haven't seen each other for a very long time) and adverb cores (I won't forget for a century).’). The meaning of a limited duration is characteristic of the nouns droplet, crumb, a little bit, involved in the process of functional and semantic adverbialization in the form of an uncomplicated accusative case: to stay a little late, to be a little late, to take a little nap.

Cf. the contexts of the use of lexico-grammatical homonyms – noun (1) and adverb (2):

(1) The titmouse was not at a loss, scooped up another drop of magic water with its beak, and sprayed Santa Claus on his chest. Moskvina, Sergey Sedov. Grandfather came to Earth] [in VAIN];

(2) Thank you. I'm going to stand here for a bit. Sulchinskaya street. From the world to horizons // "October", 2003] [NKRJ].

Adverbial expressions are functionally similar to them, denoting both the duration of a certain period (a whole hour, an entire day, etc.) and the repetition of an action at certain intervals (every second, every hour, etc.). In our opinion, the accusative forms of the year, hour, month, week, etc., which are used singly in the function of the circumstance of time (duration), are at the initial stage of adverbialization.

In the future, we will focus on the stepwise nature of the adverbialization of the substantive word form of the eyelid. A study of the conditions of its functioning indicates that this word form is capable of demonstrating different stages of transposition into a subclass of aspectual-temporal adverbs. It is noteworthy that some of these stages are located within the semantic zone of the original noun, while the last stage, on the contrary, is associated with the violation of lexeme identity and the formation of not only grammatical, but also lexical homonyms. Using the example of the word form of the century, we will show the different stages of adverbialization of nouns in the nominative and accusative forms. These stages (stages) are assigned to typical contexts and correlate with certain links on the scale of transitivity, illustrating, respectively, the zones of the core of nouns [C(och)] (3), the periphery of nouns [C (och) n (arech)] (4), hybrid, substantive-adverbial formations [from (och) n (Arech.)](5), the periphery of adverbs [from (och) N(Arech.)](6) and the nuclei of adverbs [N(arech)](7). Cf.:

(3) The twenty-first century imperceptibly replaced the twentieth century.;

(4) This moment seemed to last for an entire century (≈ ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ',, 'very long, always’);

(5) Scientists have been agonizing over the solution to this problem for a century (≈ 'стст,,,,,,,, a very long time’;

(6) You and I haven't seen each other in a century (≈ 'оч 'оч)))))));

(7) You will always remember my kindness.

2.1 The Nuclear noun Zone

The nuclear noun vek clearly shows its partial signs in the primary syntactic functions of the subject (8) and complement (9):

(8) The age of the cavalry guard is not long, and therefore it is so sweet ... Bakonin. Nine grams of plasticine (2000)In the second fragment, the tenor sings that a frog is born in spring and dies in winter, and its life is short, it lives in a swamp. Spivakov. Not everything (2002)] [NKRJ];

(9) Village huts, vegetable gardens, and sheds lived out their days, squeezed by the huge encroachment of stone and asphalt. Grossman. Everything flows (1955-1963) // "October", 1989] [NKRJ].

The substantive nature of the century is set off by adjectival words such as twentieth, ours, and his own, consistent with the noun in the categories of gender, number, and case. For example:

(10) I believe that our task is to prevent a child from falling into the hands of these pseudo–educators who claim that our age requires only cruelty from man. Gulina. Hearing someone else's pain // "Get rich" (Saratov), 2003.09.11] [NKR]; The twentieth century relied on a strong personality, a strong will, a hero [A. Kushner. Why didn't they like Chekhov? // "Zvezda", 2002] [NKR]; The Russian twentieth century likes to repeat the predictions that the thinkers and prophets of Russia in the nineteenth century made about it – Gogol, Chaadaev, Belinsky, Dostoevsky [V. Grossman. Everything flows (1955-1963) // October, 1989] [NKRJ]; He respected his century, considered it significant, valuable for history, besides, he felt personally responsible for the future [D. Granin. A month upside down (1966)] [NKRJ].

The grammatical meanings of the masculine, singular, and nominative or accusative cases of the word form century are represented by the zero morpheme (inflection), which is opposed in the general paradigm of the word to sound morphemes; cf. century, century, century, etc. The complex case-numeric paradigm of the nuclear noun includes 12 word forms. The method of its verbal subordination with adjectival words is coordination (twentieth century), with dependent forms of indirect cases – control or case adjunction (age of speeds). The noun in question belongs to the subclasses of common, inanimate and abstract (in semantics) / concrete (grammatical characteristics) words; cf., for example, its variability in the category of numbers (century / century) and compatibility with quantitative numerals (two, three centuries).

The nuclear word form of a century conveys lexical meanings: 1. 'A period of time in a hundred years; a century' (11); 2. 'A period of time characterized by something’ (12); 3. 'Life, the period of existence of someone, something' (13) ^{[12, p. 146]}:

(11) They are all old, wooden, and some are even quite strong, like the majestic bell tower under the golden onion, which, along with the top of the dome of the church and the braids of weeping willows, has been trembling in the lazy waters of the quiet river for the second century. Russians. You'll go right... you'll go left // "Ark", 2015] [NKR];

(12) The century of real live birds in photographic cameras was not long [M. The bar. "Prose is not written, it is not written" // Volga, 2011]; The golden age of the right-hand drive in Russia is already over [V. Avchenko. Right Hand Drive (2009)] [NKRW];

(13) They settled in a remote, forgotten, abandoned Lithuanian village, where the royal wrath could no longer reach them, and here they quietly and peacefully whiled away their days in thoughts and prayers for the deceased prince... Charskaya street. The Tsar's Wrath (1909)] [NKRW].

The idea of the length of a time period (‘century’), denoted by the noun century, can be enhanced by lexical means, in particular with the help of the adverb more:

(14) Meanwhile, a century ago, a completely different opposition prevailed in the minds: the Old World and the New World, which seemed both self-evident and essentially profound. Sokolov. The power of the Ocean // "Expert", 2015].

2.2 The zone of peripheral nouns

The zone of peripheral nouns includes the word form of the century in fixed grammatical forms of the nominative or accusative case and the singular, used obligatorily in combination with adjectival distributors (more often with the determinative pronoun–adjective whole and the pronominalized adjective whole) in the meanings of ’very long’, 'permanent', 'always'. Expressions like the whole century / the whole century act as syntactically inarticulate phrases that act as circumstances of time (duration) for verbs in the finite and infinitive forms, less often in the form of an adverbial adverbial participle. The very determinative pronouns-adjectives (the whole, the whole century), indicating the completeness of the coverage of the time period, actualize the idea of duration. For example:

(15) So we'll spend the whole century worrying and waiting for the weather by the sea... [B. Savinkov (V. Ropshin). What Never Was (1918)]; I despise Nyushka, I hate Volodya, especially them together, I only love Sylvester, he also pulled Volodya out of such disgrace that he would not have washed up for the whole century [F. Knorre. The Stone Wreath (1973)] [NKRJ]; What is it, to live in a hut all her life? [Yu. Poles. Love in an Era of Change (2015)] [For nothing]; But how can you forget when there is so much blood and dirt around that it cannot be cleared up for a century? [Yu. Druzhnikov. Visa to the day before yesterday (1968-1997)] [NKRW]; ... It's been raining for what seems like a century without ceasing [V. Astafyev. The Sad detective (1982-1985)]; And besides, he had not been on his native side for a century. Likhonosov. Unwritten memories. Our little Paris. Part 5 (1983)]; "I haven't embroidered for a century," she exclaimed, "you've made a sloth out of me." Jabotinsky. Samson Nazareth (1916)] [NKRJ].

The presence of consistent words prevents the century's word form from losing the categorical features of the noun – the semantics of the subject and the means of its explication: categories of gender, number and case; inflections in the morphemic structure of the word; belonging to the categories of common, inanimate and abstract-concrete words, and in general hinders in this context the further advancement of the noun century towards adverbs of duration. Cf. the context of using the substantive adverb:

(16) The century was not on the native side (≈ 'for a very long time').

2.3 The zone of hybrid structures

The century hybrid occupies an intermediate position between nouns and adverbs, demonstrating an approximate balance of properties of the parts of speech interacting during adverbialization. It is characterized by an absolutive use, i.e. without any visible adjectival and substantive distributors, in the adverbial meanings of 'very long', 'always', 'permanently', 'once'. In the semantic structure of the century hybrid, these adverbial meanings are combined with the meaning of the noun. For example:

(17) People have been searching for the elixir of youth for centuries ("a century’ and "a very long time").

Hybrids of this type are characterized by a duality of semantic and grammatical features. They are brought closer to nouns by such features as the semantics of the subject; categories of gender (in the masculine form), number (in the fixed singular form), case (in the fixed accusative form); meanings of subclasses of common, inanimate, abstract (semantically) and specific (grammatical properties) nouns. Adverbs include such characteristics of hybrids as the categorical semantics of a feature of a feature (secondary feature), the function of the circumstance of duration, immutability, adjacency as a way of verbatim connection with the main component of the phrase (vector). Let's give an example of a century hybrid from the National Corpus of the Russian Language.:

(18) "You can't live on someone else's bread, you can't hide behind someone else's back," he says. Bazhov. Broad Shoulder (1948)] [NKR] (≈ 'life’ / 'very long’).

The further movement of the hybrid word form of the eyelids towards adverbs is associated with the zones of the periphery and core of the derived part of speech. The periphery of the substantive adverbs is explicated by word forms that have lost the categorical features of nouns, namely: the semantics of the subject, a set of gender categories, case numbers, compatibility with adjectival and prisubstantial distributors, etc. Such adverbs have preserved only the lexical meaning of the original lexeme, which makes it necessary to interpret the peripheral adverb as a special, adverbial type of use (example 6). The vek nuclear adverb demonstrates the advancement of the word form to the center of adverbs, which already act as not only a grammatical, but also a lexical homonym in relation to the original noun (example 7).

3. Conclusion

The study of the semantic and grammatical properties of the eyelid word form, explicating the initial stages of its adverbial transposition and the zone of hybrid, intermediate formations, indicates a certain dynamics in the change of its categorical features. It gradually weakens its substantial nature, being used in fixed forms of the nominative or accusative case and the singular, losing in the zone of the periphery of nouns the ability to be used in the primary syntactic functions of the subject and complement and becoming a circumstance of duration. In the zone of hybridity, it has the ability to be used without dependent words in an adverbial meaning. The hybrid is characterized by a duality of semantic and grammatical properties, an approximate balance of features interacting at this stage of adverbialization of nouns and adverbs. At the stage of the periphery and core of adverbs, the century word form acts as a functional or functional-semantic homonym in relation to the original substantive word form.

Gratitude

The research was carried out with the financial support of the Russian Science Foundation within the framework of scientific project No. 24-28-00674 "Study of adverbialization as a type of stepwise transposition of substantive word forms in the system of parts of speech of the Russian language".