Qualitative semantics of the lexeme “православный” in modern Russian language

The relevance of the research is conditioned by the interest of linguistics in studying the structure of polysemous words and the mechanisms of polysemy development and lexicographic fixing the meanings of words. The qualitative meaning of the adjective православный (orthodox) is also interesting for studying the linguistic conceptualization of cultural representations of native speakers. The aim of the study is to prove the existence of the qualitative meaning of the lexeme православный in modern Russian and to describe the mechanism of its occurrence. The study is based on the corpus method. It uses Russian National Corpus, its main subcorpus with the data from the central and regional media and the subcorpus of social networks. The author describes the revealed facts with lexicographic, structural-semantic, and contextual methods. Corpus data indicate such signs of qualitative meaning as comparative forms, short forms, adverb ending in -o, an abstract noun with the suffix -ость, derivatives with the meanings of intensity and expressive attitude. The number of collected examples indicates the usual nature of the phenomenon. In our opinion, in synchrony the semantic transition is related to the effect of the implicit meanings of the producing word православие (orthodoxy) which include ideas about a certain value system, worldview positions and an external way of life. The meaning of the graded feature is thus determined by the degree of proximity to the “norm” or “standard” of the manifestation of the representations. In modern Russian speech, the qualitative meaning of the lexeme correlates with the semantic oppositions “internal – external”, “true – false” and develops evaluative meanings. The obtained results suggest further study of the semantics of the adjective and its derivatives in a systemic aspect in order to describe the structure of the polysemantic adjective православный, identify the mechanisms of new meanings and expressive-evaluative connotations formation, and contextualize its functioning in different types of discourse.