The impact of urbanization on the axiological change of a word (a study of the thesaurus fragment denoting an unordered group of people)

Abstract

The article focuses on the lexical units of modern Russian that denote an unordered group of people (crowd, horde, mass, herd, dregs, etc.). In modern usage, they are stylistically marked as most of them are either neutral or colloquial, even low colloquial. The units under consideration are also evaluatively loaded as most of them are considered to be pejorative. The semantic analysis of this thesaurus fragment makes it possible to reveal other senses peculiar to the words in question — ‘low social status’ (scum, common people, rabble, etc.) and ‘criminal intentions’ (scum, pack, gang, etc.). It is concluded that such words tend to actively enter the language during the period of intensive urbanization processes and transformation of the rural lifestyle. The growth of cities and urban populations had a significant impact on the society (the collapse of local collective forms, increased mobility of the population, etc.). The flow of people from small towns to medium-sized ones was observed at the turn of the 17th century, and the concentration of residents in large cities as a continuous trend was observed from the middle of the 19th century. It was during this period when numerous lexical units denoting unordered groups of people were attested. These words reflected the reality and values of that time. The material for the research was collected from the explanatory and historical dictionaries, fragments of texts extracted from the Russian National Corpus which ensure to identify dynamic processes in the semantics of the vocabulary in question based on the comparative analysis.

Keywords:

urbanization, values, semantic changes, pejoration, an unordered group of people