QUITE DECENT ARTICLE

The work is devoted to linguistic changes as predictable chains of semantic shifts, motivated both in general and at individual stages. The incentive to observe them was the project of a linguistic commentary on M. Yu. Lermontov’s novel “The Fatalist”, which explored the nature of discrepancies between the norm of the 19th century and modern times, primarily in vocabulary, syntax, and constructions. In the course of interpreting these discrepancies, commentators had to carefully trace the entire semantic history of the corresponding linguistic units, from the moment they appeared in the language, summarizing the processes observed typologically. The article’s material is the semantics of the word приличный ‘decent’ and related constructions in diff erent periods of its existence in the Russian language. The curious development of the word приличный is that as a word of the Russian language, it has been preserved since the Old Russian period, radically changing the meaning and contexts of usage. In particular, it has developed meanings close to grammatical, primarily evaluative, cf. приличный костюм (= ‘good suit’) and the meaning of intensity, as in приличная скорость ‘high speed’ or приличный рост производительности ‘high productivity growth’. The article traces the development process of these high-frequency uses of приличный and shows that it is semantically motivated and follows a predetermined reproducible strategy. As an analogue, other characteristic words are considered, which are close to приличный — such as подходящий ‘appropriate’ or достойный ‘worthy’. It is shown that deviations from this development strategy — cf. подобный ‘similar’, can also be explained.