COLLOQUIAL VERBS DESCRIBING FALLING IN THE CONTEXT OF LEXICAL TYPOLOGY

The article addresses the comparison of the description of the situation of falling by verbs of everyday Russian to the description of this situation in various standard languages of the world. The study is based on the classification of fall situations (frames) developed by the Moscow Group of Lexical Typology. The research material is examples from the dictionary entries of the Explanatory Dictionary of Russian Everyday Speech and the National Corpus of the Russian Language. 

Compared to the description of falling in standard languages, everyday speech describes more situations: to the frames of falling from a higher surface to a lower one, the loss of vertical position, falling-destruction and falling as a result of detachment, everyday speech adds three more — intentional (partially controlled) falling, falling with noise, and falling with pain. An important feature of colloquial speech is the absence of a dominant verb (hyperonym) subordinating all the frames. At the same time, one colloquial verb of falling can act as a dominant verb for several frames. The absence of a hyperonym within everyday speech is characteristic not only of colloquial verbs, but also of colloquial nouns. The role of the dominant verb (hyperonym) is fulfilled by the verb of the standard language, thus bringing standard and colloquial lexemes into one lexical system. Another peculiarity of colloquial verbs of falling is that unlike in literary language the fall-destruction frame is subject to the same hyperonym as verbs of falling from a height and verbs of losing vertical position. The main situations described by Russian colloquial verbs are falling from a height and loss of vertical orientation; the situation of the least interest to everyday speech is falling as a result of detachment. The main subject of colloquial verbs of falling is a human being. Only in the situations of fall-destruction and fall as a result of detachment the subject of verbs of falling is an object.