Potential words in the Russian literary language of the first half and middle of the 19th century: the basis of selection, specificity

Abstract

The paper identifies the reasons for selecting potential words in the vocabulary of the Russian literary language of the first half and mid-19th century and determines the specifics of potential words in the historical aspect. The tasks of the study were to identify the similarities and differences between such two types of non-formal words as potential and occasional as interpreted by different researchers, to collect the vocabulary of potential words in the Russian literary language of the named chronological section, and to classify the collected material based on: a) their existence in a particular context, b) their word-formation semantics and structure. The research material included texts of epistolary, fictional genres, reviews of literary-critical and socio-political nature of the first half and mid-19th century, explanatory, encyclopedic dictionaries, dictionaries of foreign words reflecting the vocabulary of the chronological interval under study, and texts of the main subcorpus of the National Corpus of the Russian language. The study allowed the author to conclude that potential words related to historical lexicology should be understood as actually existing in one or two texts or recorded in one dictionary, but not confirmed by the practice of communication of a specific time, and not as non-existent, but only possible in the system and norm of this language. Based on the material of the collected vocabulary, the author proves that potential words are not only highly productive but also low-productive word-formation types.