DYNAMICS OF WORD EVALUATION IN MODERN MEDIA AND LITERARY TEXTS: LEXICAL AND WORD-BUILDING ASPECTS

Abstract

The article represents the results of research into pragmalinguistic, semantic, and word-building peculiarities of evaluative words in modern texts. The purpose of the article is to conduct a semantic-and-pragmatic analysis of evaluative lexical units, as well as a structural-and-functional analysis of evaluative word-building means in the structure of media neologisms. The authors use methods of word-building and semantic analysis, as well as a comparative analysis of dictionary entries from lexicographic sources of the 20th – 21st centuries. The research is based on extensive material from print and electronic media, television and radio broadcasts of recent years, as well as works of contemporary fiction. The National Corpus of the Russian Language has also been used. The article describes means and factors of forming evaluation in the modern Russian language. It explores the semantic evolution of a number of words in the 20th – 21st centuries. Metaphorical transfer локомотив (locomotive) is described as one of the ways of evaluation formation. The article also examines the emergence of semantic neologisms, e.g. ювелирный (jewellery), in the language of the recent period. It identifies semantic and evaluative enantiosemy in the structure of the meanings of a polysemantic word прорыв (breakthrough). The article characterizes the evaluative correlation of a word with its contextual environment. The functional dynamism of evaluative word-building means is characterized. Different types of word-building affixes are identified in the aspect of forming evaluation in media neologisms.