CHARACTERIZING MEANINGS OF SOCIAL STRATIFICATION TERMS (SEMANTIC AND GRAMMATICAL INDICATORS)

 The article deals with personal names that call social statuses, their figurative characterizing meanings, and adjectives derived from such personal nouns. The analysis of explanatory dictionaries made it possible to identify units whose portable values are lexicalized. It is shown that changes in semantics are reflected at the level of word formation and syntax. The adjective courtier formed a new figurative meaning “close to the power and serving it”, lexicalized already at the beginning of the XXI century. Adjectives aristocratic and bourgeois are capable of forming short forms, that is, they behave as qualitative. The Russian National Corpus reflects a fairly large group of new complex adjectives with evaluation semantics, formed from the nominations of social status: barbaric-slow, disdainful-lordly. Analysis of the use of adjectives in the Russian National Corpus revealed attributive phrases with abstract nouns, whose sphere of reference did not affect social relations. Phrases with adjectives of social status are able to describe the appearance, speech, manners and person’s character. The semantics of the observer is present in the adjectives aristocratic, intelligent, plebeian, regal. Personal nouns can be used in the position of an estimative predicate. Adjectives of the same social status can appear in speech in the context of intensifiers, even those in which explanatory dictionaries do not mark figurative meanings. Five intensifiers were considered and it was shown that the broadest compatibility with them is characterized by an adjective intelligent.