«THROUGH TIME, THROUGH DISTANCE»: STYLISTIC ERROR, ELLIPSE OR RECURSIVE NORM?

The article deals with cases of grammatical «irregularities» that occur in modern speech. Particular attention is paid to collocations that denote temporal sequences: cherez vremya ‘through time’ and spustya vremya ‘after time’, in which, contrary to the current language norm, there are no specifying definitions, indications for the time interval. As a result of the corpus analysis on the material of the Russian National Corpus, the author comes to the conclusion that there is a «older» and «younger» (i.e., earlier and later) norms and rates of use of the lexeme vremya, combined with prepositions, a transition from the chronotopic perception of space and time to the idea of temporal discreteness. The article also considers the meanings of prepositions, reflecting the change in the perception of spatio-temporal coordinates. The sharp increase in «archaic» usage in the last decade, according to the author's observations, is typical for some other lexemes. This is confirmed by examples of the «older» and «younger» norms of proper government for interesovat'sya ‘to be interested’ and for the categories of state of gladness and happiness (rad ‘glad’ and schastliv ‘happy’). Such facts suggest that in the speakers’ linguistic consciousness there is something like «speech memory» that fixes the previous states of the language system. This phenomenon the author proposes to call a spontaneous recursion of the norm, thereby broadening the notion of the formation of a norm and its reflection in a culture of speech.