THE FUNCTIONING OF PLACEHOLDER NOUNS IN RUSSIAN COLLOQUIAL SPEECH

The article examines placeholder nouns (штука, фигня, хреновина, etc.) in Russian colloquial speech. These words can function similarly to pronouns by substituting for other words, but their range of functions is much broader than that of pronouns. The study analyzes two groups of vague reference words: initially neutral ones (штука, вещь, дело) and initially evaluative ones — more precisely, those with pejorative semantics (фигня, хрень, фиговина, хреновина). It is shown that words of the fi rst group (neutral words), when used as placeholders, freely denote both objects and situations, whereas words of the second group (pejorative words) in their “empty” meaning more often substitute for objects, and when referring to situations, they undergo much less desemantization, retaining their evaluative nature. Special attention is paid to the role of suffixes (-ина, -овина and -ня, -нь) which participate in the formation of derivatives from semantically unspecifi ed roots like фиг- and хрен-. Initially, a hypothesis is proposed about a possible connection between these suffixes and the nature of the referent (object vs situation). However, contrary to expectations, it turns out that the suffixes do not determine the type of referent in contexts where the examined words have an “empty” meaning, though they tend to distinguish between object-referents and situation-referents in evaluative usage. The study is based on the theory of pragmaticalization, which explains how pejorative words lose their evaluative meaning in some contexts while retaining it in others. The conclusions reached in the article are important for understanding the mechanisms of desemantization and the peculiarities of functioning of lexical items in colloquial speech.