On the issue of removing the ambiguity of the words scary / scarily, terrible / terribly in the texts of artistic prose by F.M. Dostoevsky

Ma Jingyang

The article solves the problem of separating the textual-semantic variants of polysemantic words scary, scarily, terrible, terribly in the texts of F.M. Dostoevsky. The meaning of a polysemantic word is a traditional object of study in lexicology and lexicography. When constructing dictionaries, both objective and subjective factors act, due to which significant discrepancies are observed, in particular, when interpreting a polysemantic word, distinguishing between polysemy and homonymy, compiling a definition, etc. Similar problems arise when creating ideographic dictionaries, dictionaries-thesauri. In Dostoevsky’s thesaurus, one of the key places is occupied by the textual-semantic field ‘fear’, the core and center of which includes the polysemantic words scary, scarily, terrible, terribly, and therefore the separation of the meanings of these lexemes is fundamentally important. An analysis of the use of the words scary, scarily, terrible, terribly in the texts of Dostoevsky’s literary works allows us to make the assumption that, despite the cases of non-distinguishing of meanings, there are nevertheless methods for their differentiation.

Keywords:textual-semantic variant, polysemy, semantic field, literary text, Dostoevsky