LEXICAL COMPATIBILITY OF THE LEXEME “OIL” AND ITS DERIVATIVES IN THE PRE-REVOLUTIONARY “PRAVDA” NEWSPAPER

Abstract. The Pravda newspaper was founded in 1912 as an organ of the workers’ press. The pre-revolutionary Pravda/Rabochaya Pravda (1912-1914) had characteristic stylistic and content features: since its target audience were workers, it published extensive material on the situation of workers in different provinces and at different factories, calls for workers to organize strikes, feuilletons, fiction about workers, as well as news from other areas of public life that could be of interest: criminal chronicles, natural disasters, coverage of trials, accidents, etc.

As for the style, it was also dictated by the needs of the target audience: lexical and syntactic constructions typical of colloquial speech are not uncommon, there is obvious irony: “Magistrate Altarzhevsky, examining the case of beating, was so agitated that he attacked the accused Sherman and immediately beat him in the cell”.

The demand for industrially produced oil increased greatly in Russia in the second half of the 19th century, and the newspaper Pravda also covered the life of oil workers.

The lexeme “oil” and its derivatives are found mainly in contexts (examples are given in accordance with modern spelling standards):

• industrial production: “new fountain of oil”, “about half a million poods of oil”, “oil industry “and etc.;

• related to workers in the industry: “the life of an oil industrial worker”, “under the heavy paw of oil syndicators”, etc.;

• oil trade: “oil at an all-time high price”, “prices of petroleum products”, “in the oil industry arena Rothschild appears”, “strong drop in oil prices”, etc.;

• names of commercial and industrial enterprises: Russian Oil Society, etc.;

• properties of oil: “high quality oil”, “fountain oil”, etc.;

• comparison of oil and coal: “competition between oil and coal”;

• accidents at enterprises: “oil explosion”, “oil may ignite”, etc. The lexical compatibility of lexemes is typical for the topics of articles, it is interesting to note the change in the lexical norm: for example, in modern Russian the word “rising” “вздорожание” has been replaced by a synonym “подорожание”.

The digital archive of Pravda in the EastView system was used to prepare the article.

Keywords: pre-revolutionary the Pravda newspaper, lexeme “oil”, lexical compatibility