THE CONCEPT OF HOPE: SEMANTIC VARIANTIONS OF THE NAME

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of the Russian linguocultural concept ‘nadezhda’ (hope). A hypothesis is put forward about three semantic variations of nadezhda present in the Russian language: nadezhda 1 as the subject's belief in the possibility of improving the subject’s situation in the future, with two of its subspecies: ‘particular’ nadezhda 1.1 and ‘general’ nadezhda 1.2 ; nadezhda 2 as a source of improvement of the subject's situation; nadezhda 3 as a chance, an opportunity. An analysis of 500 examples from the Russian National Corpus was carried out. Most of the examples (about 93 %) contain nadezhda 1 , while nadezhda 2 and nadezhda 3 are quite rare. The problem in determining the correct sematic variation is the limited context of the sentences included in the corpus, potentially leading to incorrect attribution of nadezhda 1.1 as nadezhda 1.2 . There are possible contexts that make it difficult to choose between nadezhda 1.2 and nadezhda 3 ; in this, the syncreticity of the variations of nadezhda can be manifested as an inherent property.