Non-normative past passive participles: Semantics and grammar of forms

Abstract

The article deals with the occasional past passive participles of the type zabluzhennyi, prisnennyi, derived from the reflexiva tantum verbs. The problem of the derivation and use of these forms raises a number of questions related to the definition of the criteria for the normativity of these derivatives, their qualification as an error or as a language game, and an explanation of the reasons for their use. The material for the corpus-based study is data from “The General Internet-Corpus of Russian (GICR)”. The purpose of the study is to search for derivational principles of occasional participles, to evaluate statistics of their use, to consider the contextual conditions of the use of participles with subjects and objects of different types, and to determine the main lexical and grammatical meanings of the words. As a result of the study, we have discovered that the derivation of these participles has an almost twenty-year tradition, since most of the forms were first fixed in the corpus in 2004-2006. Non-normative participles are most often derived from reflexive verbs directly, by passing the stage of a non-normative transitive verb without the postfix - sya. A contextual analysis shows that non-normative past passive participles are more often used with inanimate names. Finally, there were identified three meanings of the non-normative past passive participles: a resultative meaning of the time precedence of the main predicate, a stative meaning denoting the state of the subject or object without reference to the preceding action, and an adjectival meaning emphasizing timelessness, constancy of the described feature, which allows qualifying the obtained forms as verbal adjectives. Explanations given by the users to the forms of participles, words in quotation marks, and a reference to a motivating verb stem allow us to conclude that some non-normative derivatives are the result of a language game. The reason for such word creation can be considered as the speaker’s goal to fill the lexical and grammatical lacuna, obtaining the meaning of an unintentional, unconscious state without referring to a specific situation in the past. This study makes it possible to identify the main tendencies in the language of the Runet.