SEMANTIC DEVELOPMENT OF TERMS FOR ‘CLEAN’ / ‘PURE’ IN SOME FINNO-UGRIC LANGUAGES IN COMPARISON TO RUSSIAN

The article deals with semantic shifts of lexemes from the domain CLEAN/PURE relying on the data of three Finno-Ugric languages: Moksha, Hill Mari, and Udmurt (Tatyshly subdialect). The data were collected in fieldwork, mainly by elicitation. We focus on lexemes borrowed from a Russian source (чистый ‘clean, pure’ and the adverbial чисто) which developed into focus markers or intensifiers. The paper describes a set of such functions for each of the languages. We have found the following patterns of shifts (which are subject to cross-linguistic variation): restrictive focus particle, high degree of similarity in constructions with equative semantics, complete affectedness of the NP referent by some feature, complete affectedness of the NP referent by some action, high degree of intensity of the action. As a background to the Finno-Ugric data, we analyze the use of the source lexemes чистый / чисто in Russian, both in the standard language (including the oral subcorpus of the Russian National Corpus) and in dialects (relying on the data available from corpora and dictionaries). We show that all the meanings available to the Finno-Ugric lexemes occur in at least some varieties of Russian. This allows us to propose that the items under discussion could be borrowed into Finno-Ugric languages together with the polysemy patterns developed in Russian. At the same time, each of the languages under discussion develops specifi c restrictions on the use of such borrowings. Finally, we discuss the colexification of restrictive focus and intensifying semantics typical of the domain in question. Drawing some typological parallels, we analyze possible arguments for their independent development vs. for their connection with each other.