Functional specificity of Russian nominal derivatives referring to a syncretic zone of the Russian language word-building system

The study reveals the functional specificity of Russian nominal derivatives referring to a syncretic semantic zone of the Russian language word-building system. Syncretic derivatives are characterized by a composite semantic structure comprising characterizing and evaluating components. The research is grounded on functional and cognitive methodology which focuses on the study of a derivational model, propositional structure of its derivatives and realization of this structure in utterances. Using resources of the Russian National Corpus the nature of syncretic derivatives functioning is being analyzed and correlated with a dynamic propositional structure of the derivatives. Analyzing contexts where Russian syncretic derivatives function either in a syntactic position of a focus or a topic the author studies coordination of derivatives propositional elements and sentence propositional elements in the utterance and states basic laws of a derivative text inclusion. It is claimed that the coordination of propositional structures is supported by semantic parallelism of language units (preceding and following a derivative) and components of a derivative propositional structure (S, P, M1, M2, M3). The analysis proves flexibility of the derivatives referring to the Russian language syncretic derivational zone in conveying different aspects of characterization and evaluation. The stated flexibility allows a speaker to manipulate text inclusion of a syncretic derivative focusing on the explication of different components of a derivative propositional structure. Employing translation as an instrument for linguistic analysis the author reveals typological differences in Russian and English word-building patterns used to create and apply characterizing derivatives. The main difference revealed while analyzing Russian translations of English sentences is the dominance of syncretic derivatives in Russian when it comes to simultaneous characterization and evaluation (including speaker's personal attitude to a person) of a person in Russian. Russian syncretic derivatives are not only used by a translator to convey the meaning of English derivatives but also serve as equivalents for different predicative units of the English language. The results show the poly-functional nature of Russian syncretic derivatives due to their poly-propositional structure while English nominal word-building patterns create more mono-functional derivatives used either for characterization or evaluation.

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