Lexeme kolokol’chik (a bluebell). The contextual use and hierarchy of meanings

Abstract

The article reviews the lexeme kolokol’chik (‘a little bell’, ‘a bluebell’): the features of its contextual usage, analysis of meanings and establishment of hierarchical links between them. The research is aimed to describe the system of meanings of a polysemantic word and determine a linguistic status of each meaning. The research material includes examples from the Russian National Corpus.

The lexeme kolokol’chik has two main meanings that form other meanings, including contextual ones: 1) a bell (as an object) or its sound; 2) a bluebell (a flower) or its shape. It is obvious that the metaphorical meaning ‘type of flower’ is secondary to the original meaning ‘small bell’.

The article shows that currently, Russian speakers associate the word kolokol’chik in equal measure with a flower and with a bell. Yet, the data of the Russian National Corpus do not confirm that the “flower” meaning is more common. However, a diachronic approach – a sequential analysis of contexts from different time periods (19^th, 20^th and the turn of the 20^th – 21^st centuries) – demonstrated a fairly intense increase in the number of ‘floral-visual’ meanings with a significant decrease in the frequency of ‘object-sound’ ones. Therefore, it is possible to say that now we see the process of changing the statuses of two meanings of the same lexeme: the original meaning stops being the main one.