Dynamics of the attribute connections of the noun klyatva ‘an oath’ to the National Corpus of the Russian Language

Abstract

The paper investigates the dynamics of the attributive relationships of the word klyatva ‘an oath’ in the Russian texts of the 18th - 21st centuries collected in the National Corpus of the Russian Language. The authors performed statistical and semantic analyses of adjective lexemes with the word klyatva. The results include the description of the dominating adjective distributors of the word under study as substantive and the semantic fields associated with it. The number of adjective combinations in the texts of the 19th century is threefold higher compared to the texts of the 18th century. In the 20th century, the combinability concerning klyatva tended to increase, with contexts containing 57 different lexemes. The contexts of this word under study at the beginning of the 21st century contain about 40 lexemes, with more than a half being new. However, it is too early to sum up the final results on the quantitative compatibility of the 21st century texts. Every period of Russian language development is characterized by the introduction of new adjectives combined with klyatva as substantive. In the texts of the 19th - 21st centuries, the semantics of klyatva expanded as new options for compatibility appeared. Attributive compatibility shows that in the semantic scenario of klyatva, the adjectives used, first of all, emphasize the speech genre itself. Adjectives enhance the following elements of the scenario: the pronunciation of klyatva, its addressee and content, the place, the term, and the number of participants.