Verevochnaya or Covidnaya Istoriya: Desemantization of the Word Istoria in Different Discourse Types

The article is devoted to the description of the communicative behavior of the word istoria, which, as a result of the process of resemantization, is used in the “non-dictionary” meaning: ‘a thing/something’ and widely functions in modern everyday Russian speech in various types of discourse. The study was carried out on the material of 3 sources: the oral subcorpus of the National Corpus of the Russian Language, the corpus of Russian everyday speech “One Speech Day” and separate recordings of the surrounding speech (from everyday conversations, interviews, lectures, etc.). The problem of the functioning of the bleached word istoria is considered in several aspects: the dependence of such usages on the type of discourse and the characteristics of the speaker (age, professional activity, level of speech competence–LSC), as well as the ability of the resemantized word istoria to characterize an idiolect. It turned out that the word istoria with “empty” semantics plays a role of a multifunctional tool serving various types of discourse in modern Russian speech, and its active use is a result of saving speech efforts and does not characterize any particular social group of speakers. Such use has the character of an individual speech trait: in some cases, the word istoria acquires a status of a “parasite word” and indicates a low LSC of a native speaker, and in other situations, it indicates the desire of a speaker with a high LSC to establish an easy communication style.

communicative behavior of a word, core and periphery of lexical and grammatical characteristics of a word, resemantization, type of discourse, idiolect