Lexical Units with Component ‘Knowledge’: One Type of Derived Meanings

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of one type of polysemy, characteristic of predicate units, having in its meaning the semantic component ‘to know’. Such predicates are: Russian adjectives izvestnyy ‘known’ and znatny ‘noble,’ adverb znatno ‘notably,’ Russian verb slavitsya ‘to be famous,’ French adjective fameux and adverb fameusement , English adverb famously , Spanish adjectives famoso and notorio . The author shows that the basis for one kind of synchronous polysemy of these units or the relationship between their meanings at different points in their history is the semantic transition ‘known / famous’ → ‘Magn’. Magn in the “Sense ↔ text” model is a lexical function, a lexical parameter, which is an abstract typical meaning ‘very,’ ‘high degree,’ which is expressed in a large number of words, most often in an idiomatic way. The study is based on a large body of explanatory and bilingual dictionaries, on the data of linguistic corpora. The relevance of the study is determined by the fact that the study of semantic transitions is the basis for the establishment of ways of semantic evolution and the development of the typology of semantic derivation, as well as the basis for the study of the language picture of the world and the construction of explanatory language models. The obtained data can be supplemented with the “Catalogue of semantic transitions,” which was developed at the Institute of linguistics of RAS under the guidance of Anna A. Zaliznyak.