USAGE AND SEMANTIC SHIFTS TYPOLOGY OF THE DIMENSIONAL WORDS OF BIGNESS IN UKRAINIAN, PERSIAN AND AZERBAIJANIAN

Abstract

In the article the lexical typology of prototype (objective), extended (non-objective) and metaphorical usages of adjectives and adjective nouns in the modern Ukrainian, Persian and Azerbaijani languages is constructed using the semantic metalanguage. Its most important components are: the observer (an imaginary one), who is joined mentally to the participants of the situation by the speaker; verticality (determines the position of the object with regard to the Earth surface and is oriented at the standard human stance); surface (characterizes the objects with distinctive, visible contours); front side, (forepart, face) and its opposite back side (rear, back) of objects are connected with the idea of human appearance (front=face) and the direction of movement; interiority (it is essential for a person to feel oneself at a particular point in space: near/far, here/there, inside/outside, and the like); emptiness/fullness (the categories to describe objects in the shape of containers); container (or receptacle); boundaries (the ideas of space always include certain boundaries); background (actual or imaginary); part/whole, plurality, mass/discrete (countable) objects. The same (identical) method of parallel descriptions in these languages allowed, first, to identify the main type of usages of lexemes with the meaning of dimension: to describe the topological type of «shapeless» objects (spot, cloud, yard etc.). Second, two regular semantic shifts in the studied languages were identified: «shapeless» object – amount: pers. lakke-ye bozorg ‘big spot’ → goruh-e bozorg ‘large group’, azerb. böyük ləkə ‘big spot’ → böyük dəstəsi ‘large group’; «shapeless» objects – total value: pers. lakke-ye bozorg ‘big spot’ → badbakhti-ye bozorg ‘great grief’, azerb. lakke-ye bozorg ‘big spot’ → böyük faciə ‘great grief’. Such an explicit description (it clearly indicates the conditions for the implementation of each form) allows us to create high-quality dictionaries and grammars of the studied languages.