Semantics and Functioning of the Word "Osoba" in Russian language
The article is devoted to the analysis of the meaning of the person's token and the features of its functioning in the Russian literary language, and above all in the language of modern federal newspapers. The history of the semantics of this word includes the periods of development (the beginning of the 18th century, the 21st century), and the periods of the "crisis" (the second half of the 18th century-the end of the 20th century). In the first half of the XVIII century there are processes of semantic expansion of the values of this lexeme, which begins to be used not only to designate an ‘important person of special significance’, but also ‘every human individual’. However, to the 2nd half of the XVIII century there is a narrowing of the value to the original, and then the "deterioration" of semantics - the word person begins to be used in ironic contexts. Both these meanings are an ‘important person’ and the same, but with a litter "in an ironic sense", are preserved according to the data of the dictionaries until the end of the 20th century. Modern speech practice testifies to certain processes of expanding the meaning of this lexeme and returning to it the right to be a linguistic unit with "normal" semantics. At present, the word "person" is used primarily in two senses: ‘important, respectable person’ and ‘female person’.