Note sulle strutture linguistiche della crisi nello spazio slavo

This contribution offers some notes on the Russian word krizis and its equivalents in other Slavic languages. Brief considerations on the phonetics and the grammatical gender of these loanwords from modern Romance and Germanic languages are followed by an examination of how the senses of the lemma krizis are treated in some of the most authoritative works of the lexicography of the Russian tradition, from Vejsman’s Greek-Russian vocabulary to Vasmer’s etymological dictionary and Ožegov’s dictionary of contemporary usage. The frequency of use recorded in certain corpora of Slavic languages is then considered and it is concluded by noting how, in the description of contemporary usages, the crisis is configured as a ‘rupture’, a ‘break’. This represents a shift away from the traditional view of the crisis as a change from a previous phase.