VERBS OF TOTAL AND EXCESSIVELY MULTIPLE MANNERS OF ACTION IN DIACHRONIC ASPECT

The article deals with the origin of total and excessively multiple manner of action expressed by the prefix iz- and the confix iz-...-sya, and the dynamics of their develop ment from the 11th century to the present. These manners of verbal action are of the spe cial interest since they express a whole range of actional meanings (intensity, duration, often multiplicity, dispersed impact on the object, negative result) and are distinguished by stylistic marking, expressiveness, and regularity of functioning in the modern Russian language. Data of Historical dictionaries as well as the Russian National Corpus provided the main language material for the research. It has been established that total manner of action dates back to the Common Slavic era. In Ancient Russian, these verbs appear as a result of semantic and morphemic word formation; in Old Russian their num ber increases signifi cantly due to the expansion of semantic categories of basic verbs. In modern Russian, the word-forming types corresponding to this manner of action are productive and regular. Negative consequences of action in verbs of the total manner of action are manifested as a negative state of the object or subject, resulting from excessive intensity or duration of an action, coverage of the entire surface of the object by an action. The research revealed that in the course of historic development the stylistic colouring of verbs of the total manner of action with the prefi x iz — has changed from bookish and neutral to predominantly colloquial. It has been ascertained that a few verbs with the meaning of an excessively multiple manner of action, marked with the prefi x iz-, are already found in the 11th – 12th centuries; the formation of verbs of this manner of action in confi xal way took place only in the 15th – 16th centuries. In modern Russian, verbs of an excessively multiple manner of action express a whole range of aspect meanings (in tensity, duration, multiplicity, negative state of subject, manifested as fatigue, badness, exhaustion, acquisition (loss) of negative characteristics, character traits, habits, etc.); these verbs are regular, productive and characterized as predominantly colloquial.