Religious vocabulary and the features of its usage in the Russian language (based on the adjective адский (hellish)

Abstract

The current article analyzes the sacred vocabulary functioning in the Russian language. Based on the lexical-graphical sources and the Russian National Corpus, we examine the history of the adjective adskii (hellish), which demonstrates typical ways of religious vocabulary desacralization and the juxtaposition of the conceptual meanings of sacred and profane. The diachronic method of research allowed us to trace back the mentioned adjective’s history; the descriptive method, with reference to the written sources first and foremost, helped with the description of this lexeme’s function specifics in different periods of the Russian language development. We used the materials of explanatory dictionaries of different eras to establish the chronological borders of the word’s semantic changes, such as the “Materials for a Dictionary of Ancient Russian” by Izmail Sreznevsky, the “Dictionary of the Russian Language of the 11th–17th” edited by Stepan Barhudarov, the “Dictionary of the Russian Language of the 18th century” and the data from the “Dictionary of Russian Idioms” by Galina Kustova created on the basis of the Russian National Corpus. The most important stages for the desacralization of the adjective adskii are its usage in an uncharacteristic context, as well as the changes in its semantics caused by the similar changes in the semantics of the noun it was derived from. As a result of our research, we have come to the conclusion that the adjective adskii in the modern Russian language serves a pragmatic function of the evaluative intensifier, while saving its figurativeness and negative connotation.