Revolution, insurrection, coup: semantics and pragmatics

The purpose of this paper is to clarify semantic differences between the words.........,......... and......... in present- day usage. Being members of the same semantic field, they nevertheless display some intuitively obvious disparate semantic features. However, these features are only partly attested in dictionaries. We study the meaning of the words.........,......... and......... in presentday Russian using typical contexts from the Russian National Corpus (RNC) and the Internet. Further, we identify distinctive features that should be included in the definitions of these words and compare our findings with descriptions of their meanings in several well-known dictionaries.. The analysis of the present-day usage of the three words will demonstrate a number of semantic differences between these words that were not characteristic of their usage at the beginning of the the twentieth century. These semantic and pragmatic shifts are not, however, attested in dictionaries. It is therefore important, in the near future, to focus on diachronic shifts in the course of the last hundred years as well as on formulating new definitions that reflect the present- day usage of these words.