The lexeme ubogii: History, lexicographic recording, interpretation..

The article analyses the history and lexicographic recording of the lexeme ubogii (poor, crippled, squalid) and examines specific cases of its use. The relevance of the study is due to the insufficient information provided in dictionaries since they do not fully describe the semantic structure of the lexeme and, consequently, to the difficulties in its interpretation. The article aims to reconstruct the semantic structure of the lexeme and to propose an interpretation of its lexical semantic variants in Russian literature works. The study utilised definitional as well as contextual word analysis. The research revealed that modern dictionaries contain some gaps in their interpretation of the lexeme ubogii and cannot always address user requirements. Studying sources and analysing dictionaries based on definitional criteria which take into account the critically significant difference in the referents denoted by the word resulted in the reconstruction of the current semantic structure of the lexeme under consideration. This structure represents a set of meanings that developed in the Russian language from the Proto-Slavic counterpart. The sources yielded instances of the word ubogii and the collocation ubogii dom (a squalid house) which were not recorded in dictionaries. The analysis of the use of ubogii in Russian literary works revealed interpretive difficulties arising due to the objective complexity of its semantic structure and the imperfections of existing dictionaries. As part of this study, an experiment was conducted to interpret the word ubogii in N. A. Nekrasov’s poem "Grandfather Frost the Red Nose". The experiment demonstrated a lack of consensus on the interpretation of this axiologically important passage from the school literature curriculum. The article concludes that the semantic structure of the lexeme ubogii reconstructed in the course of the study should facilitate a more precise differentiation of its lexical semantic variants in nontrivial cases of use.

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