UPDATED NEW MEANINGS OF THE MODERN RUSSIAN WORDS

Abstract

Тhis article is devoted to the study of the semantics of words in children’s speech, consideration of the individual meanings of words in children who use well-known words in their own, “children’s” meanings, unknown to other native speakers (in other words, in non-systemic meanings). Such meanings are activated in the minds of native speakers in individual use in the speech of children and adults, in youth and computer jargon, etc. The individual meaning of a word, that is, the non-systemic meaning present in the individual consciousness of one native speaker, is the least studied among the types of linguistic meanings. Such meanings have no precedent in the language system, require context, and are unknown to the vast majority of native speakers. “Children’s” meanings of well-known, systematic words are of particular interest, as they make it possible to observe the mechanism of development of a child’s speech in the process of growing up. When studying words with individual meanings in dictionaries of children’s speech, in works on ontolinguistics, in Internet sources (“Children Speak”: a site for children and parents), as well as in the live speech of native speakers aged mainly from 3 to 8 years. We conducted an exhaustive selection of systemic (commonly used) words with non-systemic (individual) meanings and made an attempt to classify such words depending on the method of formation of individual meanings and the mechanism of the child’s speech thinking. The identifi ed groups of word meanings (false etymological, phonetic, synonymous, actually agnonymic, metaphorical and others) make it possible to determine how the child comprehends new objects and phenomena, how language forms and categories are searched for in the surrounding speech environment, when they are constructed independently, what moments cognitive development of the child’s personality is pushed to master multi-level language means.