TOLK AND TOLKI: DIACHRONIC PORTRAIT OF A NOUN WITH THE SEMANTICS OF THE MENTAL SPHERE

The article investigates the process of diachronic evolution of polysemy in Russian tolk, which is interesting by its non-trivial distribution of lexemes within the numeric paradigm. Despite the paradigm’s formal completeness, in modern Russian, tolk and tolki belong to two semantically unrelated classes of constructions. In order to identify the relations of semantic derivation in the structure of polysemy of tolk, semantic derivations were examined from a diachronic perspective. Semantic shifts in the meaning of tolk and related constructions were traced using corpus data, as well as data from the card catalogs of The V. V. Vinogradov Russian Language Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences. It was shown that the original tolk did not possess the semantics of speech, but rec0eived it only at the turn of the XVIII–XIX centuries as a result of the constructionalization of the predicate tolkovat’. At the same time, the very development of the polysemy of tolk was due to metonymic transitions and then lexicalization, which allowed this noun to remain in the usus despite the gradual weathering of the original lexical structure.