TOWARDS THE EXPRESSION OF THE FUNCTION MAGN IN RUSSIAN EVERYDAY LANGUAGE (THE UTTERANCES OF THE Tot esche student! (‘HE IS THAT STUDENT!’) TYPE)

The author investigates conversational expressions of the Тот еще студент! ‘He is that student!’ type. The order of the components and grammatical gender in them may vary: тот еще/еще тот, та еще/еще та, то еще/еще то, те еще/еще те (tot yeshche/yeshche tot, ta yeshche/yeshche ta, to yeshche/yeshche to, te yeshche/yeshche te).These constructions are used to express the lexical function Magn ‘high degree, intensity’. Usually these expressions have pejorative (negative) connotation, but sometimes they are used to convey the feelings of approval and even admiration. Examples from contemporary Russian works of fiction are provided. The author attempts to reveal the mechanisms of correlation and interaction of ‘quite’ and ‘badly’ semes. The article provides semantic analysis of nouns that fill the position of predicates in these expressions. On the basis of the material extracted from the Russian National Corpus (about 400 examples), it is shown that words with originally negative connotation (бандит bandit — ‘bandit’, нахал nakhal ‘cheeky’, урод urod — ‘freak’) match the general semantics of the expression. Words with neutral and positive meanings (бизнес biznes — ‘business’, герой geroi — ‘hero’, золото zoloto — ‘gold’), after becoming a part of the expression, get ironic reading. Irony is most obvious in case of diminutives (народец, подарочек, работка [lit. little people, present, job] etc.).