Word's Pragmatic Potential and Modern Lexicographing Principles (shown on example of an agentive noun любитель)

The following article presents a detailed semantic and functional analysis of the noun любитель, exposing a set of its meanings. It is revealed (with the Russian National Corpus’s contextual material as basis) that the speech of the modern Russian lan-guage speakers utilizes 10 lexico-semantic variants of the aforementioned noun, as op-posed to the 2 variants found in dictionaries. They are differentiated not only by seman-tic parameters but also by grammatic (subject category characteristic, obligatory grammatic valency, syntactic roles) and pragmatic parameters, which are defined by 1) emotive-evaluating meanings (or, the ability of the said lexeme to represent polar evaluating meanings) and 2) orientation on a particular ‘communicative purpose’ (for example, in everyday discourse the lexeme любитель is used to describe ‘drinking persons’ and functions as an euphemism or a PC formula).