NEW WORDS OR NEW VARIANTS: ON MULTIPLE INTERPRETATIONS OF SOME LEXICAL INNOVATIONS OF THE XXI CENTURY

The article considers the problem of language status of some innovations of modern Russian speech, distinguished by absence of semantic differences with the original word. Such neologisms present secondary nominations of culture-specific concepts, created for the purpose of language play, novelty effect. They include apocope (prots, stab); visual neologisms (otPIARit’); Internet nominations like devushko, igrushk, etc. In Russian linguistics there is a tendency to consider such novations as a result of derivation. However, when a new sound or graphic form directly motivated by the existing word appears in speech, we cannot always speak about derivation or define the novation itself as a new lexical unit. A usual word can be subjected to intentional transformation (grammatical, graphical, phonetic), that results in its occasional variant. For the theory of neology the differentiation between derivation and variation is very important, since in the general scientific sense this differentiation leads to the question about the limits of word variation, which is connected with the problem of identity of a word. In practical sense the solution of these questions determines lexicographical fixation of neologisms, their position in the structure of a dictionary entry.