Semantics and the functional potential of prefixal verbs derived from names of the ethnos in 19th century Russian language

Abstract

Any serious socio-historical event in the life of an ethnos requires the creation of a metalanguage; because of this, Russian language verbs derived from the names of nations and nationalities (ethnonyms) appeared in the nineteenth-century. Being at the intersection of two major linguistic tendencies — the realization of word-formation system potential and the need for linguistic expression of new concepts from various spheres of social life — they form a constantly growing vocabulary and became an indicator of extraordinary activity of national language consciousness. For the language view of the world, the subfield of a change in the qualitative state (which includes prefixal verbs derived from the names of the ethnos which describe the problems of interethnic contacts) is significant. The confixal model with the prefix o- (ob-) was universal for this lexicon, but models with other prefixes began to compete, for example, za-, iz-, po-, and others. Due to prefixes, the quantitative modification of the degree of the characteristic varies, since the verb as a part of speech has a gradational relationship. The seed of intensity, actualized by a prefix, can act as means for forming an expression. The active use of such verbs in 19th century texts of different genres demonstrates the significant potential of verbal lexicon in a system of stylistic resources. It is the anthropocentricity which determined the appearance of their evaluativity, based on an emotional attitude to reality, and a certain stylistic status.