Conceptualization of norm in language: from norm of psychic state to the social interaction norm (as based on Russian adjectives “vmenyayemyy” and “nevmenyayemyy” analysis)

The paper focuses on the semantic description of Russian adjectives related to the notion of the psychic norm - vmenyayemyy (‘mentally healthy, able to act consciously’) and nevmenyayemyy (‘mentally insane, unable to be responsible for his actions’). Originally used in the forensic examination discourse, both lexemes were successfully integrated into less specific areas of Russian communicative practice. This study applies the methodology of distributive, contextual and semantic analysis of lexemes concerned to describe their meanings in politic, publicist, consumerist discourses, everyday small-talk practice and modern fiction texts. Our research corpus includes 220 utterances with vmenyayemyy and 282 -with nevmenyayemyy extracted from the National Corpus of Russian Language, supported by examples from Internet resources and statistic data on the lexemes’ frequency displayed by Google Books Ngram Viewer service. The author describes five distributive types of nevmenyayemyy and four common distributions of its antonym and proposes a draft of their general semantic interpretation. The results also show a metonymic extension of the concept of norm deeply implicated in the semantics of adjective vmenyayemyy : from primary idea of a normal psychic state through its behavioural manifestations to a vast notion of socially expected and anticipated interaction and its results. Thus, vmenyaye- myy acquires the new function of the norm operator allowing native speakers to categorise the complex world of reality into two classes of entities: the one that corresponds to the norm of social interaction, and the one that does not. Such functional transformation results in more frequent use of this lexeme.

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