Innovations in the field of evaluation: semantic transformations of neological univerbs

Abstract

The article discusses the changes in the semantic structure of neological derivatives of nouns formed by the method of univerbation. The main attention is paid to the analysis of semantic transformations occurring in univerbs motivated by high-frequency adjectives in modern Russian. Since the analyzed derivatives in their concrete-subjective meanings go back to stable attributive-substantive word combinations, in this paper the corresponding lexemes are considered as formed by the method of univerbation. At the same time, it is noted that the word-formation status of adjective-based derivatives with an extremely broad meaning is uncertain since they cannot be correlated with a specific ambiguous nomination. It seems that the activation of the process of repeated derivation of univerbs is associated with the unique property of univerbation as a method of word formation, which is the absence of a nominal component of the attributive-substantive word combination in the morphemic structure of the derivative. In the course of analyzing the contexts of the use of univerbs in the National Corpus of the Russian language, two types of semantic changes generated by the repeated implementation of the word-formation model are identified. The first type is the specialization of meaning, which results in the emergence of a new subject lexical-semantic variant, the second one is the appearance of an extremely broad characteristic meaning due to the loss of differential semantic features and a specific denotative attribution. Most of the considered univerbs combine the meanings of a person and an object within one lexeme. The subject or feature value is primary, the person value is secondary. The analyzed processes are considered as a linguistic manifestation of ideological and conceptual changes in vocabulary caused by social changes at the turn of the 20th–21st centuries. Univerbs motivated by "fashionable" adjectives are in demand in the language of mass media and colloquial speech as a means of nomination and evaluation of current realities expressing the values of consumer society including the idea of high social status, commercial use, demonstrative success, etc.