The space of word families with the base words MOUSE and RAT by the beginning of the 21st century

The purpose of this work was to identify the structural and semantic features of the author’s word families WF1 (rat) and WF2 (mouse) at the present stage. The scientific novelty consists in the introduction of new lexical material into scientific use, the construction of the author’s WF1 (rat) and WF2 (mouse) on this basis and the determination of their parameters by complex structural, semantic and derivatographic analysis. The article examines the patterns of the appearance and functioning of derivatives from zoonyms in language and speech, which allow us to judge the trends in the development of the axiology of zoonyms by the beginning of the 21st century. As a result, it was found that the growth of agonality of modern society brings the rat as a symbol of evil to the forefront in comparison with the traditional zoonym “mouse” for Russian linguoculture. With the similarity of structure, the dominance of the morphological method of word formation and noun components, WF differ in volume, preference of word composition (WF1 (rat)), frequency of contamination (WF2 (mouse)). Due to the genre nature of the sources of lexical material in WF2 (mouse), there is a numerical preponderance of adjectives and adverbs. Proper names predominate in WF2 (mouse) 2.7 times more often than in WF1 (rat). Proper names of trending agonal characters are found in works of the fantasy genre, satire; hybrids with a softer character – in children’s literature, lyrical poetry.