Substantiation is a linguistic term denoting the transition to nouns of words from different parts of speech. The term itself, translated from Latin, means "noun". The article gives answers to the questions: can the words of all parts of speech turn into nouns? Are substantives used in literary texts?
How do they move from one part of speech to another?
Definition of the concept of "substantiation"
This is a rather lengthy process related to:
loss of the main syntactic meanings of the word;
its objectification, by acquiring the word's ability to match the paradigm of a noun, that is, to decline in cases, change the number.
Which parts of speech can words be substantiated from?
Most often, such nominal parts of speech as adjectives and numerals are subject to conversion. Let us give the following examples of substantivation in Russian:
| Non-substantive form | Substantive form |
| Chin (what?) military(adj.) | He commanded (who?) military (n.) |
| Room (what?) pantry (adj.) | Store (where?) in pantry (n.) |
| Number (what?) first (num.) | Eat (what?) first (n.) |
| Squirrels (how many?) two (num.) | Walking along the street (who?) two (n.) |
| Buy (how much?) a couple (num.) pears | Dancing (who?) couple (n.) |
Words and non-nominal parts of speech can be substantiated. Often these are participles: meat (what?) ice cream (adv.) - cold (what?) ice cream (n.); guys (what?) speakers (adv.) - invite (who?) speakers (n.).
You can see how words that have turned into nouns are objectified, acquire the ability to decline, change their syntactic significance.
Words from adverbs can also act as nouns, especially often used in artistic style.
Thus, in the famous poem "A Cloud in Pants" by V. V. Mayakovsky, the word "quiet" is found in the meaning of a noun: "For shaking people in the apartment, a quiet hundred-eyed glow breaks from the pier."
Such use of adverbs gives speech a special pathos: sad yesterday, happy tomorrow.
From the history of substantiation in Russian
One of the first in Russian linguistics was the outstanding philologist V. V. Vinogradov, who noted the peculiarity of this method of replenishing vocabulary. Even earlierN. I. Grech spoke about the "omission" of some adjectives, meaning their substantivization. A. A. Potebnya connected the transitivity of words with their historical proximity.
The phenomenon of substantiation is an interesting mechanism for expanding vocabulary. The non-standard of this method of word formation was actively used by the poets of the Silver Age.
