Semantic changes of the word “home” in the Russian language of the first decades of the 20th century

Abstract

The relevance of the study is determined by the necessity to identify semantic changes of the word “home” in the social consciousness associated with historical, cultural, social, political and economic transformations. This authors describe and analyze the semantic changes of the word “home” in the social consciousness of the Soviet Russia and the Russian diaspora abroad in the first three decades of the 20th century. The purpose of the study is to reveal the semantics of the word “home” in the first three decades of the 20th century through the ana-lysis of fiction texts of that time. For this purpose, a complex methodology for analyzing vocabulary was used, including the descriptive method based on the analysis of dictionary definitions, linguo-stylistic analysis of fiction texts. The research material includes dictionary definitions of the word “home”, represented in the basic explanatory dictionaries of the 19-20th centuries and dictionaries of modern times, fiction and memoir texts. The novelty of the presented data lies in the fact that the analysis of the semantic changes of the word “home” is for the first time carried out in order to compare individual sections of the linguistic picture of the world of Russian speakers in Russia and in emigration against the backdrop of the revolution and in the first post-revolutionary decades. The linguistic reflection of this key concept of Russian linguistic culture at the junction of the two historical eras - pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary - is socially conditioned and presented as a turning point in fiction and memoirs of the first half of the 20th century. Further study of the semantics of the word “home” is supposed to be connected with the observation of the language of the late 20th - early 21st centuries.