NEW EMOTIONAL AND EXPRESSIVE NAMES FOR PEOPLE LOOSELY CONNECTED WITH THE CHURCH AS AN ATTEMPT TO FILL A LEXICAL GAP

The article discusses through the prism of semantics and sociolinguistics new negatively tinged expressive words which emerged in the Russian Orthodox Christian milieu in the last years of the previous century and are used by active parishioners to describe, with a hint of haughtiness, various groups of people loosely connected with the Church. The distinguishing criterion of these groups is the frequency and purpose of participation in services. The core of this classification is the opposition prikhozhane (‘parishioners’, literally ‘those who come by’) vs zakhozhane (‘occasionals’, literally ‘those who drop by’); the latter, in their turn, are further categorized into a number of types with varying degree of negative connotation. The least negative among them is the word zakhozhane, which denotes people who merely formally follow the superficial, ritual facets of religion, and constitutes the hypernym for all names of people loosely associated with the Church. From a formal standpoint, the analyzed words consist of (1) neosemantisms or semantic neologisms, i.e., words which are formally identical to words of general language but take on new meanings, e.g., kulichi (‘people who come to Church once a year to bless Easter food’, literally ‘Easter cakes’), and (2) verbderived nouns, formed predominantly with the suffix -anin (pl. -ane), like zakhodit’ (‘to drop by’) — zakhozhanin/zakhozhane; privodit’ (‘to bring someone’) — privozhanin/ privozhane (‘those who only come to Church when brought by other people’). All the analyzed words are essentially colloquial; it would seem, however, that their function is not limited to enriching the repertoire of expressive lexis. Particularly standing out in this respect is the lexeme zakhozhane, which has taken on an almost terminological status when it comes to classifying groups of active parishioners and people loosely connected with the Church, which fits well into the semantic system, and which fills an existing lexical gap.