USAGE AND SEMANTIC SHIFTS TYPOLOGY OF THE DIMENSIONAL WORDS 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; verticality; surface; frontage (front, face) and the opposite back (rear) of objects; inside; empty / complete (categories for the description of objects in the form of containers); container; borders; background; part / whole, set, mass / discrete (calculated) objects, as well as people and parts of the human body. The same (identical) method of parallel descriptions in these languages allowed, first, to identify three types of usages of lexemes with the meaning of height: 1) to describe vertically elongated bottom-up objects of rigid configuration, or type “spire”: wood, pipe, wardrobe, cap, wheat, house, etc.; 2) with nouns to denote objects of the topological type of the so-called “footings” raised on the surface: high chair, high table, high handrails (their main function is to serve as a surface on which you can lean when performing a certain action); 3) with nouns to denote the topological type of objects that are constantly located above the surface, the base: high branches, high clouds. Second, six regular semantic shifts in the studied languages were identified: high “spire” – raised above the surface “footings” (tall tree – high handrails); high “spire” – a permanently located object at the height (tall tree – high clouds); permanently located object at the height – quantitatively high level, result (high branch – high yield); high “spire” – a qualitative phenomenon, process (high wheat – high feelings); raised above the surface “footings” – a careful, respectable result (high table – high throne); a permanently located object at the height – an elusive result (high clouds – high culture). 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.