THE SEMANTIC POTENTIAL OF THE VERB РЕЗАТЬ 'CUT'

Abstract

The present paper aims to reveal the semantic potential and to classify the meanings of the Russian verb резать 'to cut' as a lexeme with the vividly expressed instrumental semantics. The material for the study was selected from six Russian dictionaries and from Russian National Corpus. The methodology involved dictionary entry analysis, component analysis with identification of the semes, ranking of the semes according to the frequency of occurrence and their distribution into the core or periphery based on their frequency. The contexts of the verb usage were compared to distinguish between prototypical and non-prototypical manifestations of instrumentality. As a result, the total of 25 semes were identified and classified. The seme ‘to divide’ was distributed into the core as it appeared in all the six dictionaries, whereas the meanings ‘to operate’, ‘to kill’, ‘to engrave’, ‘to cause pain’ and ‘to speak bluntly’ were assigned to the near periphery with each occurring in five out of six dictionaries. The study found that instrumentality is manifested by the three-component structure “subject - instrument - object” whose components are explicitly manifested for direct meanings and implicitly manifested for figurative meanings formed by metaphoric transfer. The findings prove the high polysemy of the verb and its adaptability to a wide range of contextual environments, both displaying a considerable semantic potential of the verb to reflect the multidimensional human experience.