Lexical innovations with the root popolam (‘in half’) in the Russian gendered Internet discourse

Abstract

The relevance of the study is underpinned by the modifications of the Russian society gender canon, the Russian gender worldview transformations and by the growth of importance of the communicative and linguocultural Internet space that constitutes the field of spontaneous social, psychological and linguistic experiments and also representative sources of information on the Russian-speaking men and women’s speech practices. The research is aimed at revealing and describing derivational, semantic and functional features of the 23 lexicographically undefined, engendered lexical units motivated by the adverb popolam (‘in half’) pointing at the extralinguistic situation of the financial responsibility dividing ina couple. The research is conducted on the material of the authors' contexts corpus including 1750 speech products manifesting informal Internet communication that were published inthe period from 2012 to 2022. The corpus contexts were obtained by continuous sampling method with the help of the Russian social network VK search engine and Google web search engine. The authors used methods of word-formation, semantic interpretation, contextual and discursive analyses and statistical method. The analysis has diagnosed that the constituents of the derivational nest with popolam- as the basis are used to nominate, categorize, characterize and evaluate masculine and feminine persons as participants in romantic, sexual and family relations. The innovations are also used to denote and characterize relationships in a couple from the point of view of financial responsibility division between partners. They are also used to designate actions and behavior types of participants in such relationships. The analysis proves that the innovations contain stable negative evaluation and are prevalent in woman's language. The analysis revealed that the functions of denomination, categorization and negative evaluation of the social interaction subjects and phenomena depend on the main ideological function of the innovations. The ideological function is increasingly important underthe circumstances of the conflict between patriarchal and new egaliterian gender contacts. It is determined that popolamshchik (‘slammer’) as a male denomination is not only the most widespread and important constituent but also a key word of the gendered Internet discourse.