Linguistic Resemantization of the Petersburg Text: Mechanisms and Frontiers of «Art» Expansion within the Urban Linguistic Landscape

The study focuses on the morpheme «art» and the specifics of its functioning within the linguistic landscape of St. Petersburg. The subject of the study is the processes of semantic transformation (resemantization) of the «art» morpheme in the names of urban locations and spaces. The analysis of the linguistic landscape reveals an active transformation of the urban environment, where the traditional institutional concept of «iskusstvo» (fine arts) is consistently being replaced by a mobile and commercialized «art paradigm.» Based on the analysis of a corpus of 300 ergonyms, the article identifies an expansion of «art» against the indigenous element of urban nominations «iskusstvo.» The methodology employs a complex of approaches including descriptive method with linguistic observation, definitional, structural-semantic, communicative-pragmatic, and discursive analyses. Furthermore, the study utilizes the resources of the Russian National Corpus and field research techniques of the linguistic landscape, which makes it possible to record pragmatic shifts in the naming of urban objects. The study proposes a semantic typology of «art-nominations» (organic, connotative, and simulative types) and establishes a correlation between the density of the use of the morpheme under study and the nature of urban territories. It is determined that the resemantization of «art» is driven by a complex of factors: morphological (brevity and high word-formation activity of the lexeme), semantic (diffusion and vagueness of meaning), and sociocultural (demands of place branding and commodification). The paper argues that the expansion of «art» leads to its semantic devaluation and the emergence of linguistic simulacra. This process results in the changes in the classical «Petersburg text,» where aesthetic significance is replaced by marketing efficiency, which affects the traditional cultural codes of the city. The theoretical significance of the study lies in the substantiation of a shift in the urban linguistic landscape architecture from the «city-as-a-book» model to the «city-as-an-interface» one. It is concluded that in the linguistic landscape of a Russian city (using St. Petersburg as an example), the morpheme «art» serves as a tool of linguistic marketing, creating surplus symbolic capital under conditions of semantic devaluation of the term.