Content and collocative patterns of the lexeme “пузырь” (bubble) in the economic context

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to describe the semantic content of the lexeme “пузырь” (bubble) as realized in the economic discourse of the modern Russian language. The article presents a comprehensive description of the word’s meaning: actualized semes are identified, paradigmatic relations and typical collocational patterns are determined, and the specifics of its comprehension by native Russian speakers are analyzed. The scientific novelty of the study lies in its specialized focus: for the first time, the semantics of the lexeme “пузырь” (bubble) is examined specifically within an economic context. The lexical-semantic variant under consideration is represented in specialized online dictionaries, yet it is absent from entries in standard Russian explanatory dictionaries. As a result of the study, it is established that the lexeme “пузырь” (bubble) in an economic context functions as a borrowed metaphor. The word denotes a market situation characterized by an unjustified rise in prices that culminates in a sharp drop, or the “bursting of the bubble”. In most of the analyzed sources, this situation is described as artificially created, large-scale, and dynamic. An analysis of texts from the Russian National Corpus and the findings of a sociolinguistic survey revealed that today the specialized meaning of the lexeme “пузырь” (bubble) extends beyond a narrow professional domain, it is actively used in media language and is easily understood by Russian native speakers.