Verbs with secondary prefixes PERE- and NEDO- in the linguistic consciousness of Russian speakers

Russian polyprefixal verbs have a special place in the nominative language system, as these units do not only serve to express the character of the action, specifying its parameters, but also contain a vivid evaluative component in their semantic structure. Estimation of a designated action by intensity is expressed by prefixes in verbal vocabulary. In this aspect, the prefixes PERE- and NEDO-are indicative as a means of expressing the excess or lack of intensity of action. There are numerous works on verbal polyprefixation, yet some issues are to be discussed, including questions about the particular meanings of secondary prefixes, their psychologically real semantic components, etc. Therefore, it seems promising to turn to the linguistic consciousness of Russian speakers in order to identify the nature of the conscious treatment of secondary prefixes as semantic and structural elements of a polyprefixal verb. The article presents the results of a series of psycholinguistic experiments designed to study the nuclear and peripheral components of psychologically real meanings of these prefixes, the establishment of the nature and extent of the conscious treatment of their semantics. The novelty of the study is a new approach to the study of the semantic structure of the verb by reference to the metalinguistic consciousness of ordinary native speakers. The phenomenon of metalinguistic consciousness is considered as a complex multi-level system, part of the structure of language consciousness. In the study a specific role belongs to the category of awareness of linguistic phenomena. The work is based on the assertion, popular in modern psychology and linguistics, that perception of polymorphic words is a complex and ambiguous process in which special emphasis is made on the realization of relative units, which are secondary verbal prefixes. The obtained experimental data indicate that the linguistic consciousness of native speakers when thinking about situations of action described by verbs with the secondary prefix PERE- actualizes the parameters "repeated action", "multiplicity of objects and exhaustion", "excessiveness", etc. In contrast to the diverse range of the semantic components of the meaning of the secondary prefix PERE-, the respondents related the prefix NEDO- with expressing the meanings of incompleteness of the action. The content that the respondents refer to the prefixes under consideration is conceptualized through the notion of the norm of verbal action, the excess of which is usually regarded negatively. The results of the study allow stating that native speakers understand the secondary verbal prefixes PERE- and NEDO- as elements of the general model of designating actions reflected in the totality of all its elements, and are a specialized means of expressing the norm of verbal action.

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