IKHNII, TOLIKA AND RYBOVA, OR WHAT MICRO- AND NANODIACHRONIC METHODS GIVE US

The article is devoted to diachronic methods of research in the con temporary Russian language which the author offers to divide into traditional macrodiachrony that deals with centuries and long periods of time; microdiachro ny that investigates changes over periods of time from 5 to 50 years; and nanodia chrony that analyses linguistic phenomena appearing during a year or even a month. From the standpoint of the diachronic approach, the significance of fixing linguis tic phenomena, contemporary to the researcher, becomes clear, while, in addition to corpus-based statistics, interviewing and questioning methods are important. The author identifies the stages of microdiachrony in the Russian language which are related to extra-linguistic factors. They are conventional, especially their dating, and yet the idea of such division is useful in various studies, particularly related to literary standard. It was convenient to divide the 18th–21st centuries into six stages: (1) from the end of the 18th century to 1765 — the stage fixed in the first systemic codifying grammar of M.V. Lomonosov; (2) from 1766 to 1859 — the stage of aris tocratic culture bearers whose speech is influenced by the French language; (3) from 1860 to 1916 — the stage of formation of raznochintsi culture, both inheriting the nobility culture and repelling from it; (4) from 1917 to 1991 — the stage of the So viet standardizing tradition; (5) from 1992 to 2015 — the stage of partial release of speech from the pressure of codification and the formation of the “spoken-written” language of the Runet; (6) from 2016 to the present day — the stage of adaptation of speech to realization of its meaningful part through digital technologies. Then the author analyses the diachrony of three phenomena to illustrate these ideas. Firstly, it is an attempt of the pronoun ikhnii to enter the Russian language 135 which ended up with it becoming a marker of substandard speech and at the same time developing the relative meanings “foreign” and “alien”, which gradually became normative. Secondly, it is a description of the history of the word tolika, released from the phraseology and used as a quantifier with the meaning of “small fraction”, and further loosing quantitative definiteness and moving towards the meaning of “fraction”, “part”. Finally, in order to demonstrate the work of nanodiachronic methods, the author describes the word rybova which emerged in the speech of the Runet in the last two years as a result of a language game with the case ending -ov and filled up certain semantic lacuna.