Features of the Semantics and Functioning of the Preposition PO in Modern Russian (On the Material of Texts of the Scientific and Official Style)

This article presents the results of a study on the identification of features of the semantics and functioning of the preposition "PO" in modern Russian. The relevance of the study is due to the need to study changes in the field of the functioning of prepositions (in particular, the preposition "PO") occurring along the lines of modern language processes. One of the most polysemantic prepositions of the Russian language, the preposition "PO" currently demonstrates an increased activity (it is used in various constructions with different types of syntactic relations), which leads to the blurring of its semantics. In this regard, the aim was set to identify and describe meanings of the preposition "PO" that are the most active in modern Russian and features of their implementation in the texts of the scientific and official functional styles. For this, the author analyzed the scientific and reference works of literature devoted to the description of the preposition "PO", and developed her own classification of meanings based on the types of syntactic relations: attributive, subjective, objective, adverbial, completive (complementary in phrases). Then this classification was applied in the semantic analysis of the features of the functioning of the preposition in the texts of the scientific and official styles. About the same number of texts of each style (800 pages of A4 format) was taken for comparative analysis. The language material of the study comprised 2,860 contexts with the preposition "PO" (811 from scientific style texts, 2,049 from official style texts) extracted by continuous sampling. The analysis consisted in determining the type of meaning in each context and making the necessary statistical calculations. Conclusions about the most frequent relations in modern Russian and meanings of the preposition "PO" and about the stylistic connotation of some meanings were made as a result of the analysis. Thus, adverbial and attributive relations are the most frequent. In their framework, the meanings of "indication that sb./sth. acts according to sth., based on sth.", "indication that sb./sth. is consistent with sb.'s opinion, sb.'s theory", "indication of the characteristics of sb./sth. in relation to the field of activity, area of knowledge" are the most active. The meanings of the preposition "PO", assessed by modern linguists as "blurred" and non-specific, were refined and detailed by identifying narrower and more specific semantic shades as a result of the analysis. The interrelation of some meanings of the preposition "PO" with the scientific and official styles was established on the basis of the frequency of this preposition's usage in them. A further study of the features of the functioning of the preposition "PO" in journalistic and colloquial styles, as well as in non-literary forms of Russian, can become the prospect of this study.

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