Diachronic Study of Lexis of the East Slavic Languages: the Problem of Allocation and Description of Lexical-Semantic Paradigms

The article is devoted to the diachronic description of genetically close vocabulary of the East Slavic languages on the basis of the study of its origin and semantics in the context of the urgent problems of historical derivatology, lexicology and lexicography of Slavic languages. A lexical family and its variants are considered to be the main complex unit of the lexical-semantic system of language: the family of words – in certain synchronous sections in the history of each language; the root and etymological families – in the history of kin languages development. The author introduces the notion of lexical-semantic paradigm (LSP) – a system-forming unit which includes etymological nests connected with deep semantics underlying the internal form of roots. These roots represent the families' top which got development in the history of the East Slavic languages. The possibility and necessity for LSP allocation is proved on the basis of morphemic and word-formation analysis, semantic analysis of the vocabulary of reconstructed etymological families *dō- 'давать, дать' ('to give'), *ber- 'брать' ('to take'), *em- 'взять, иметь' ('to take, to have'), *nes(ti) 'нести' ('to carry'), reflecting the chronological stages in the development of genetically close lexis from the Proto-Slavic language to the modern language. The top of these families forms an LSP the key words of which (давать // дать – брать – взять – иметь – нести – давать) are united by the sequence of values they express, and contain common semes – 'attached object' and 'subject's action aimed at attached object'. Semantic intersection of these lexemes is conditioned by the syncretism of values of Proto-Indo-European roots to which they ascend, and the influence of paradigmatic suppletion (O.N. Trubachev's term). The author of the present article confirmed this fact by Belarusian-, Ukrainian- and Russian-language examples (literary and dialectal lexemes, word-formation pairs and chains, component names, idioms and contexts). The author believes that consideration of the dynamics of complex etymological families during the whole period of their existence as part of the LSP is one of the ways to solve the problem of creating a complete and systematic essay of East Slavic historical lexicology