Any language as a social phenomenon is a living, moving phenomenon, intimately connected with the life of its speakers. Therefore, the language reflects the history of the people, their culture. And the concept of the norm of a literary language also underwent a change from time to time.
Therefore, the normalization of the current language in general and Russian in particular is a rather complicated phenomenon. After all, its signs are both stability and variability. Stability, because the language enshrines the spiritual, moral, mental experience of previous generations, variability - due to the movement forward of society itself. Therefore, over time, some rules and requirements become obsolete in the language, and others come to replace them. It sways all language levels - vocabulary, phonetics, orthoepy, morphology, punctuation, stylistics. For example, if during the time of Pushkin it was permissible and even correct to say “bed”, now at the end of this noun feminine of the third declension the purely letter “L” is written: bed.
Thus, the norms of the literary language, on the one hand, provide uniformity in the understanding of written and oral speech, and , on the other hand, make it possible to trace how the language changed, what processes took place in it, and what their influence is.
The scope of the language
The norms of the Russian literary language are usually divided by linguists into the so-called general and particular. The general are called so because they function in the language in general, and the private in its individual manifestations. For example, in poetry, some rules apply, and in documents of an official business style, others.
General norms of the literary language, for example:
- in orthoepy, both the correct pronunciation of words and phrases and the correct arrangement of stress words are regulated. For example, the word “horses” according to the norm is pronounced like this: [lashidEy] with emphasis on the last syllable;
- in morphology, according to the norm, the noun “oranges” has the genitive form “oranges”;
- in word formation, the word "animal" can have two suffixes - -shush- and, as an option - -shush-;
- in vocabulary, the words “skillful” and “artificial” have different meanings, and therefore are used in different contexts: “skillful” - as a form of manifestation of skill (skillful artist, skillful embroidery) and “artificial” in the sense of “not real, fake” (laughter) sounded strained, artificially).
Separately, we can say about the logical-syntactic norm. It regulates the construction of phrases, and of them - sentences. If this norm is violated by removing an important semantic element, for example, a word or part of a phrase, the statement will cease to be understandable.
The norms of the literary language, related specifically to the syntax, determine the relationship of words in phrases, the type of connection, the order of arrangement of words in sentences. If the syntactical norms are violated, semantic impoverishment of the phrase occurs, semantic inaccuracies arise: At the meeting, the deputy director spoke a lot about working with lagging behind in many subjects to increase their academic performance.
The basic norms of the literary language in spelling know the correct spelling of words. Violation of them leads not only to illiteracy, but also to a difficulty in understanding the written statement. So, in the sentence “The boy did not sit long and ran to play”, the word “WATCHED” is written AND (sitting), and not E, otherwise it turns out that “the boy sat down”, i.e. became gray.
As for punctuation norms, they regulate the division of sentences into intonational-semantic blocks, which are marked with punctuation marks in letters . This makes it possible to correctly not only build a statement, but also to understand it. As an example, we can recall the Old Russian texts in which there were no punctuation marks . Therefore, to read such a text and understand it was quite difficult. The well-known phrase about execution and clemency acquires double significance. Its meaning radically changed from where the comma was put.