LANGUAGE OF RUSSIAN CHARITY: VERBS

This article studies Russian verbs which name the action of gratuitous material assistance to those in need, i.e (sic), (sic), (sic), (sic), (sic), (sic), and their few derivatives. The author focuses on the history of their origin and use in the Russian language, the development of their meanings, semantic features, and functioning in the text. The analysis of these characteristics of the life of the word in the language allows the author to identify and formulate some norms of the use of these verbs in modern charity discourse for those who speak and write about charity. The study is based on historical and modern lexicographic sources, such as explanatory dictionaries of the Old Slavic Language, Old Russian Language, Russian language of different time periods, as well as examples of word usage, retrieved from The National Corpus of the Russian Language. In spite of the fact that the verbs studied realise the predicate of a situation of charity and designate the subject's action of providing a poor or deprived object with material support, they considerably differ in terms of time of their appearance in the language, periods of usage, and semantic capacity. The analysis demonstrates that there is no verb that could claim the status of a nuclear verbal lexeme of the semantic field of charity: the word with the widest neutral semantics (sic) has almost fallen out of use, the verbs (sic) and (sic) have a narrower application, while (sic) imposes semantic restrictions on the choice of words for the positions of the object and the instrument of charity, and in the case of the verb (sic) a specific context of "market" charity is important, in which the subject receives a certain benefit from their contribution.