The Crocodile in the Russian Language, Consciousness, and Culture

The development of figurative secondary meanings in a word is due to the correlation of denotative and reference components, i. e. sigmatics and semantics. The starting point of the study is the hypothesis that the farther the object is from the everyday life of a society (i. e. the more exotic it is, the less significant in practice, the less common for the native speaker), the weaker, the "emptier" is the denotative part of the name. However, this non-semantics is apparent, because denotative emptiness is immediately compensated by the development of figurative meanings, most of which are connotative. This article examines the Russian word (sic), meaning an exotic water animal. The author studies the characteristics of this lexeme based on explanatory and frequency dictionaries of the Russian language, associative dictionary, the Russian National Corpus, and several examples from Russian fiction: works of Vl. Solovyov, A. Chekhov, M. Gorky, T. Tolstoy, V. Kantor, etc. For Russian consciousness, the crocodile is a marginal creature, and its name is located on the periphery of the vocabulary. The national corpus of the Russian language contains 500 documents with the word (sic) and a total of 1222 entries. The analysis demonstrates that about two thirds of these documents contain the word (sic) in figurative meanings. This confirms the assumption that the word denoting a thing that does not participate in the daily life of a society has a tendency to secondary semantic content. It is interpreted metaphorically, in accordance with the cognitive and communicative needs of society.