Representation of a man’s appearance by the naming unit дядя ‘uncle’ in modern Russian

The aim of the study is to identify the semantic and pragmatic features of the representation of a man’s appearance by the naming unit дядя ‘uncle’ in modern Russian. The scientific novelty of the paper consists in an attempt to present the features of implementation of the lexico-semantic variant ‘an unrelated male with certain physical characteristics’ of the word ‘uncle’ to create a complete lexicographic portrait of the word дядя based on a systemic integral approach involving the language material of the Russian National Corpus. As a result, it has been found that the specified lexico-semantic variant of the word дядя shows a low frequency in modern Russian, it was most actively used in the 1930s. In the composition of the considered lexico-semantic variant, there are three semes: ‘height’, ‘physique’ and ‘strength’, this variant in most cases is realised with the help of their combinations, the most frequent one being ‘height’ + ‘physique’. Dictionary data is not always supported by language material: the attribute сильный ‘strong’ proposed by most dictionaries shows a low frequency in the language material. The implementation of the lexico-semantic variant under consideration always occurs explicitly with the help of lexical, stylistic, grammatical (morphological (affixation) and syntactic (parcelling)) and punctuation (commas between the attributes that the author considers homogeneous) means.