Emotions and attitudes in present day Russian through the prism of new words: Cultural semantics of zhest’ and related concepts

Russian Journal of Linguistics. 2022. Vol. 26. No. 4. P. 970–994.

Anna Gladkova

Contemporary Russian lexicon is characterized by rapid change which involves borrowings, the use of new words and expressions as well as the emergence of new meanings from the existing word forms. The paper considers the development of the colloquial use of the word žest’ (from žest’ ‘tin’ – a type of metal) and the increase of use of the words žestkij ‘hard/tough/firm’ and žestko ‘firmly/toughly’ as an example of ‘internal’ language processes. Žest’ belongs to the domain of colloquial speech and youth slang, but it is also infiltrating other types of discourse. Žestkij and žestko are shown to be prevalent in the political discourse as a sign of power. The paper analyses the semantics of the words and establishes cultural links between the meaning of the words and broader cultural themes. It uses the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) as a method of semantic analysis relying on data from the Russian National Corpus. Despite belonging to different types of discourse, the words are shown to be closely connected conceptually and the cultural prominence of the concept is emphasized.

Keywords: political discourse, Russian, emotions, youth slang, language change, Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM)