Characteristics of the polysemic noun «real’nost’» in Russian newspaper texts

In this paper, the abstract noun real’nost’ is studied based on the newspaper texts included in the electronic corpus ‘Russian Newspapers of the End of the 20th Century’, developed by the Laboratory for General and Computational Lexicology and Lexicography, Lomonosov Moscow State University. The studied word, as well as other polysemic nouns formed with the productive suffix -ost’, may obtain regular concrete meanings besides the meaning of abstract attribute. Due to the polysemic nature of this particular type of nouns, contexts play a rather significant role in understanding and studying them. The purpose of the paper is to identify the semantic and contextual characteristics of the given noun while being used in different meanings in newspaper texts. Based on the corpus data, we have revealed the most frequently used meaning of the word and the contextual characteristics of each particular meaning. The study has shown that in Russian newspaper texts created in the late 20th century, the concrete meaning of the word real’nost’ demonstrates a considerably higher usage frequency than its abstract meaning. The noun also developed a third meaning, as a result of which it can be used in the plural form. In addition, the studied word has been analyzed in a comparative perspective. When it is used in the position of the subject or an actant in original texts in Russian, its abstract meaning can only be expressed by predicates or attributes (subordinate clauses) in Chinese. This proves that the Russian language has a comparatively higher level of ‘communicative fragmentation’, which is mainly based on nouns formed with the suffix -ost’.