from norm of psychic state to the social interaction norm
(as based on Russian adjectives “vmenyayemyy” and “nevmenyayemyy” analysis)
The paper focuses on the semantic description of Russian adjectives related to the notion
of the psychic norm ‒ vmenyayemyy (‘mentally healthy, able to act consciously’) and nevmenyayemyy
(‘mentally insane, unable to be responsible for his actions’). Originally used in the forensic
examination discourse, both lexemes were successfully integrated into less specific areas
of Russian communicative practice. This study applies the methodology of distributive, contextual
and semantic analysis of lexemes concerned to describe their meanings in politic, publicist,
consumerist discourses, everyday small-talk practice and modern fiction texts. Our research corpus
includes 220 utterances with vmenyayemyy and 282 ‒ with nevmenyayemyy extracted from
the National Corpus of Russian Language, supported by examples from Internet resources and
statistic data on the lexemes’ frequency displayed by Google Books Ngram Viewer service.
The author describes five distributive types of nevmenyayemyy and four common distributions
of its antonym and proposes a draft of their general semantic interpretation. The results also show
a metonymic extension of the concept of norm deeply implicated in the semantics of adjective
vmenyayemyy: from primary idea of a normal psychic state through its behavioural manifestations
to a vast notion of socially expected and anticipated interaction and its results. Thus, vmenyayemyy
acquires the new function of the norm operator allowing native speakers to categorise the
complex world of reality into two classes of entities: the one that corresponds to the norm of social
interaction, and the one that does not. Such functional transformation results in more frequent
use of this lexeme.
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from norm of psychic state to the social interaction norm
(as based on Russian adjectives “vmenyayemyy” and “nevmenyayemyy” analysis) // Сибирский филологический журнал. 2019. № 1. Pp. 230–242. DOI: 10.17223/18137083/66/19.