FIGURATIVE POTENTIAL OF THE WORD LANGUAGE IN RUSSIAN POETRY: CONSTRUCTIONS OF PERSONIFICATION

The main purpose of the work is to explore the metaphorical uses of the word language in poetic contextsin which personification is observed; determine the circle of words – objects of comparison combined with thismetaphor, identify the comparative frequency characteristics of these words, trace the chronology of their appearancein the Russian poetic language, analyze the renewal of the traditional metaphor language by poets with the help of otherwords associated with it by close semantic ties (dialect, jargon, names of different languages, etc.). The material of thestudy is a selection of contexts with the meaning of personification with the word language and words associated withit by synonymy and hypero-hyponymy relations from the Poetic Subcorpus of the Russian National Corpus. Whenanalyzing the linguistic material, the corpus method, the semantic field method, and the structural-functional methodwere used. As a result of the study, semantic classes of objects of comparison characterized by the considered personifierwere identified – “The inner world of a person”, “Nature: plants, water, wind, animals, etc.”, “Objects created by man”,the time frames and comparative frequency of their use. Conclusions are drawn about the variation of the traditional metaphor language both at the lexico-semantic and at the formal levels. The results of the study represent one of the fragments of the metaphorical system of the Russian poetic language of the 19th–21st centuries in its development.

metaphor, personification, language, dialect, Russian poetry, evolution