Zhenshchina ‘woman’, nezhnost’ ‘tenderness’ and nuzhnost’ ‘neediness’ in the paronymic formulas of russian poetry

Abstract

The article is devoted to paronymic lexical and semantic paradigms and stable combinations
of paronyms-attractants that appear in poetic texts, which can be called “formulaic”. The
author defines paronymy as a systemic linguistic phenomenon of convergence of words that
sound similar, but differ in morphemic composition and semantics, which becomes possible
due to the allocation of quasimorphs in them, a kind of euphonic etymons. Considering the
“formulaic” correlations of the lexemes zhenshchina (‘woman’), nezhnyy / nezhnost’ (‘tender /
tenderness’), nuzhno (‘necessary’) and zhizn’ (‘life’) in 150 fragments of poetic texts of the late
18th — early 21st centuries, the author shows the possibility of occurrence within the paradigm of combinations that form parasyntactic predicative unities, in
which attractants form sound metonymies and metaphors and
expand their original meanings at the expense of additional semes
transmitted during attraction. At the same time, attractant words
turn into components of a complex nomination of a certain object or
situation. Thanks to the establishment of logical-semantic relations
of predication even with a distant location of attractants, each of
the attractants can be both “definable” and “defining”, representing
a propositional component. Micropropositions (Life is a woman,
Life is tenderness, Woman is tenderness, Life and a woman needs
tenderness, etc.) correspond to a macroproposition that combines
all the elements of the paradigm. The analysis refl ected in the
article confirms the assumption that stable paronymic correlations
unite not random words, but a kind of mythologemes. In this case,
the words-concepts zhenshchina (‘woman’), zhizn’ (‘life’) and
nezhnost’ (‘tenderness’) are considered as mythologems. The study
was carried out on the material of the poetic subcorpus of the
Russian National Corpus using the methods of corpus, semantic,
syntactic, textual analysis.

Keywords:

paronymic attraction, paronymic “formulaic” combinations, lexico-semantic paradigm, phonic syntax, semantic transformations, image of a woman, poetic text