SEMANTIC AND STYLISTIC COMPONENTS OF THE MEANING OF THE WORD “ROOF” AND “ROORING” IN DIACHRONY AND SYNCHRONY

The lexeme “roofing” has been recorded in writing since the twenteeth century, while its synonym “roof” was noted in the 18th century for the first time only. Exploring within the framework of the article the stylistic and semantic components of the meaning of these words in different periods, the etymology and representation of lexemes close to them in other Slavic languages, genre limitation or, conversely, polyfunctionality, we find explanations for this fact. On the axis of diachrony, the nouns are semantically identical, even etymologically going back to the same verb (“to cover”), but they reveal a stylistic difference. The “Dictionary of the Russian Academy” qualifies the lexeme “roofing” as neutral, while “roof” is accompanied by the label “vulgar” (“vulgar” is defined in the dictionary itself as “belonging to, peculiar to, decent to the mob, low, simple people”). This explains the earlier and more frequent use of the word “roofing”. In the nineteenth century, words from folk speech began to be massively borrowed into the literary language; during this period, the lexeme “roof” was in demand, it lost its stylistic and functional limitations - as evidenced by the data of the “Dictionary of the Church Slavonic and Russian Language” (1847). From that moment on, the “roof” becomes a full-fledged participant in book discourse, being used in works of various genres. In the following, this lexeme is used as the main variant. Statistical data, which are formed on the basis of the contexts presented in the National Corpus of the Russian Language, confirm the clear prevalence of the word “roof” in the second half of the 19th century (3000 examples against with the word “roofing”). In the twenteeth and twenty first centuries, there is a tendency towards a semantic-stylistic delimitation of the words “roof” and “roofing”: the latter forms a narrower terminological meaning.