Социальный статус купца в русском языке: номинативные и характеризующие признаки
The Social Status of a Merchant in the Russian Language: Nominative and Characterising Features

Summary/Abstract: This article describes connotations of a noun which is a denomination of social status. In the Russian language, the lexico-semantic group “social stratification” is directly related to the hierarchy of legally defined social estates. The study analyses interpretations of meanings of the personal noun kupets ‘merchant’ and the adjective kupecheskiĭ ‘merchant’ provided in explanatory dictionaries, and examines the connectivity of the adjective in the Russian National Corpus. The results make it possible to distinguish between the denotative and connotative use of the adjectival phrase ‘merchant’ + noun. In nineteenth-century Russian, the denotative aspect of those attributive word combinations is related to the house and the family, which reflects the features of the corporate structure of merchant enterprise.

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