Opposition "healthy - sick" in the Russian language

The article proves the unequal representation of «sick-healthy» opposition in the language. The study of the normative private-evaluation opposition «sick-healthy» allows the authors to find out that only the left part of the scale is graded on the scale of assessment, while the right one remains unchanged. It is established that the right (polar, normal) part of the rating scale is rather weakly reflected in the vocabulary, in comparison with the left (abnormal) part. Highly productive are the word-building models that convey the value of incomplete presence or absence of necessary standard features or the value of redundancy, additional, unintended features. As in most normative private-evaluation oppositions, the left (abnormal) part of the evaluation scale, at least on the lexical and word-formative levels of the language system, has a wide range of means of implementation, much broader than the right (normal) part. It is confirmed that the abnormal features are more interesting for the language in terms of identifying objects.