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of its meanings originally denoted ‘a servant, an attendant’, but
now — ‘a civil servant of higher rank, a person administering a
department of state or accredited by one state to another’.
It is of interest to note that in derivational clusters a change
in the connotational meaning of one member doe’s not necessarily
affect a the others. This peculiarity can be observed in the words
accident аn accidental. The lexical meaning of the noun accident
has undergone pejorative development and denotes not only
’something that happens by chance’, but usually’something
unfortunate’. The derived adjective accidental does not possess in
its semantic structure this negative connotational meaning (cf. also
fortune: bad fortune, good fortune and fortunate).

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