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Abstract: The article discusses lexemes marked in the explanatory dictionary edited by D. N. Ushakov with the note “kants.” (officialese), which accompanies other than the main entry (direct) meaning of a polysemantic word. This limitation in the research material, first of all, allows tracing the historico-stylistic “shifts” of the selected lexemes – mainly from natural language to clichéd business speech, which has its own unique history of development within the Russian literary language. Singling out the vocabulary accompanied by the mark “kants.” in the general vocabulary makes it possible to present a separate lexico-stylistic subsystem as one whole (a corpus), explore its internal organization, and consider the most significant evidence of the influence of extra-linguistic factors on it. The vocabulary marked “kants.” in Ushakov’s dictionary demonstrates the activity of metonymic mechanisms and the work of the principle of economy of speech effort at the moment of its formation. In the course of the study of official vocabulary, belonging to the group “officialese” in its secondary meaning(s), it has been clearly revealed that, on the one hand, it is closely associated with bookish written culture, which subsequently results in the noticeable archaization of the officialese in general, and on the other hand, with colloquial speech, especially in the ways of morphological formation of new words. The article describes the part-of-speech composition of the selected corpus of lexemes and its thematic and functional features. It is emphasized that the most representative in terms of quantity and content is the nominal vocabulary with the general theme of “office work”, including both words that are leaving office usage (memoriya ‘memorial’, peresnyat’ ‘copy’), and those that are just forming their “official” meanings (delovod ‘clerk’, dirizhor ‘conductor’, zav ‘manager’). The article considers a remarkable history of the officialese bumaga ‘paper’, which used to be a generic term for any document in the early Soviet era. The study gradually and care-fully develops the idea that the dictionary, focused primarily on fixing the norms of the contemporary Russian language of the Soviet era, clearly records the emerging separation of the official style, in which the “alienation” of a person from the text and from its personal, authorial essence becomes more and more salient.

About the author(s) :

Tatyana S. Sadova

Saint Petersburg State University (Saint Petersburg, Russia)

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6232-3433

 

Dmitry V. Rudnev

Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia (Saint Petersburg, Russia)

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3264-9483

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 29.09.2023; date of publication: 30.12.2023

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